Bertrand RussellJerry Shaffer's 
Notes on the Modernist Dream
of a Perfect Langauge

This is the Modernist dream:  Define your terms, make your observations, and let the deductive and inductive logic machines do their thing.  

Here is a very early formulation of the dream, found in Leibniz (1667), who, by the way, is credited with being one of the first to have the idea of a computer.  Here is an excerpt:
 
 

If we could find characters or signs appropriate for expressing all our thoughts as definitely and as exactly as arithmetic expresses numbers or geometric analysis expresses lines, we could in all subjects in so far as they are amenable to reasoning accomplish what is done
in Arithmetic and Geometry.

For all inquiries which depend on reasoning would be performed by the transposition of characters and by a kind of calculus, which would immediately facilitate the discovery of beautiful results.

And if someone would doubt my results, I should say to him: "Let us calculate, Sir," and thus by taking to pen and ink, we should soon settle the question.

Now the characters which express all our thoughts will constitute a new languge... this language will be...very easy to learn.  It will be quickly accepted by everybody on account of its great utility and its surprising facility, and it will serve wonderfully in communication among various peoples.

There will be no equivocations or amphibolies, and everything which will be said intelligibly in the language will be said with propriety.

Leibniz p.15       

In early twentieth century this dream became very popular in philosophical circles.  It is interesting to note, too, that  Bertrand Russell wrote his first book on the philosphy of Leibniz.  And Russell's Principia Mathimatica was the effort to create a new language, modern symbolic logic, in which all of the theorems of arithmetic could be stated and proved.  He actually recommended  that children start with logic and build to arithmetic.  

This modernist dream was to eventually include all of science, too.  Wow!  What a dream.  What drives this dream is the search for truth.

(more notes to be added to this document)

Reference:

Wiener, P. P. (Ed.) (1951). "Preface to the General Science," in Leibniz Selections, N.Y.: Scribners, 1951.