Is Python the Esperanto of programming languages?

[Isaac To]

>>>>> "Peter" == Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> writes:

    Peter> Is Chinese more or less able to be used for reliable
    Peter> communication in a noisy channel (viz information theory)?

    Peter> *That* would be one correct way to judge the value of redundancy,
    Peter> not a simple "it's successful", I think.  There may be other
    Peter> dimensions along which we can measure, but in all cases it's more
    Peter> or less, not yes or no.

To Chinese, the whole inflection thing, let alone agreement, is plain
stupid.  If you want to express that there are multiple objects, or that an
object is female, or that an action is taken in the past, then say it in an
explicit word is the easiest way to catch attention, rather than changing
the verb, noun, adverb or adjective by a tiny bit which produce very weak
sound and can easily be overwhelmed by noise or even just wind.  If you care
so little that you don't want to add a word, you probably don't want even
the inflection.  And, inflections make it difficult to express when the key
concept determining inflecting is unknown (or the speaker just doesn't
care), like "there [is/are?]  [unknown whether one or many] apple(s?)."

BTW, Yes, Chinese is indeed *much more* resistent in noisy environments (but
for a very different primary reason: it's louder).

On the other hand, the Chinese way to have numbers always followed by a word
which is pretty much meaningless but must "match" the noun is plain stupid
as well.  Chinese also adds a huge gap for ease of learning by having a
character set of more than 60K (even if most Chinese users regularly use
less than 3K out of it).  It's lack of a small set of grammatical structures
(those "Sentence=Subject+Verb+Object" forms) also makes it hard to parse.
Not to mention that it's use of tones to differentiate words makes it nearly
impossible for non-native speaker to pronounce and recognize correctly.  I'm
not just blindly bashing inflected language. =)

One of my friend (who learnt many languages as hobby, varying from German to
Vietnamese to Sanskrit, and natively speaks 3 dialects of Chinese and of
course know English as well) once told me that "all natural languages grow
to the maximum difficulty that a normal person can handle".  I think there
is quite some truth about it.  Over time those easier languages have cruft
built on it, in names of "stylish", etc; and those which are more difficult
becomes extinct unless systematically simplified by authority.  So all
common natural languages are similarly difficult, the difference is just
where are the difficulties.  While I do believe all the above complains are
reasonable complains, I still use and respect the languages.

But if someone design a language, explaining that the aim is for it to be
easy for everybody, that everybody can learn as second language in addition
to what they would be learning anyway, I do expect him to do a survey of the
common languages in the world to see where are the difficult parts and where
are the easy parts of each language, so as not to repeat the former.  It is
clear that Zamenhof didn't do that.  Just for the choice of sounds, how he
could possibly let the tongue vibrating "r" sound, the double consonant "ts"
(i.e., "c") sound, the unvoice/voice sound pairs "s" vs "z" and "sh" vs
"jx", and the very difficult to recognize pair "u"/"uj" slip in his
language?!  But he gone further from repeating other's mistakes---he adding
some of his own (e.g., allowing arbitrary word ordering in a sentence, which
makes it nearly impossible for a listener to guess what is the next word, or
even just what is the *form* of the next word).  That's why I said that
Esperanto is inelegant.

Regards,
Isaac.