What is Python?

[Peter Hansen]

Nick Bensema wrote:
> 
> I looked at Perl and thought, "man, this is confuzling.  This is like
> no programming language I know.  And like all of them.  It's nuts."
> Then I heard about how Mr. Wall modeled it on human language, and
> suddenly it all made perfect sense.  Perl is the computer equivalent
> of English, in a historical sense.
> 
> In contrast, Python looks to me like Esperanto.  It's meant to give
> everyone equal footing, and be easy to learn and dive right into,
> while at the same time it can be wordy and cumbersome.

(Like I haven't extended enough threads with "Esperanto" in them yet.
:-)

It sounds like you are implying Esperanto can be "wordy and cumbersome",
a charge I've never heard until now.  Esperanto is generally considered
quite compact, and definitely not cumbersome.  Its flexible word
ordering and agglutinative nature (allowing word meanings to be modified
in a consistent manner using affixes, in the manner of English tacking
"ly" on the end of things to make them adverbs) are key features making
it neither wordy nor cumbersome.

Esperanto can be slightly longer than English, when measured character
for character, but shorter than French.  When examined from the point of
view of a syllable being the basic unit of "cumbersomeness", Esperanto
beats out both, if I recall correctly (but only just slightly... English
is *quite* compact).

I'm the first to agree with the comparison of Python to Esperanto,
however, having subjected the good-natured occupants of c.l.p to that
claim in several other threads.  And they still let me in here (but only
just barely, I think.) ;-)