Is Python the Esperanto of programming languages?

[Erik Max Francis]

Carl Banks wrote:

> I say redundancy is not required at all for a language, and most
> languages have very little of it.  Sometimes what looks like
> redundancy isn't really redundancy, but rather superfluousness.

That sounds like a distinction without a difference.  It isn't
redundancy because you choose not to call it redundancy, you'd rather
call it superfluousness.

> For
> example, in English, if I say, "The man go to the store," no native
> listener is going to wonder what I meant.  Leaving the final sibilant
> off the word "go" sounds bad, but it doesn't affect the meaning of the
> sentence.  It's completely superfluous.

Actually, it isn't.  "The man go to the store" is unclear precisely
because it's incorrect English.  Does he mean "goes," or "went," or
"will go," or "would go," or "must go"?

That isn't to say that all languages which don't include some form of
tense in their verbs are incomplete, but it certainly means that leaving
a crucial grammatical element out while speaking in a language
introduces ambiguity for the very simple reason that since you're not
using the language correctly, the listener is no forced to guess what
you mean.

> Sometimes it is redundancy, though.  For example, someone hearing the
> phrase "this heads" might wonder if the speaker meant one or many
> heads.

Same thing is going on here.  Lack of proper conjugation (in a language
which requires it) inherently involves the introduction of ambiguity.

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