Natural languages generally are not designed by humans, they're just designed by the participants and you say something new and somebody else says, "Oh, that's a cool way to say it," and the next thing you know, everyone is saying it because it's shiny.

I don't believe I've ever cuddled my elses.

To ordinary folks, conversion is not always automatic. It's something that may or may not require explicit assistance. See Billy Graham.

The choice of approaches could be made the responsibility of the programmer.

A journey of a thousand miles continues with the second step.

Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in.

Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one.