Python slang

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, Aug 6, 2016 at 1:10 PM, Steven D'Aprano
<steve+python at pearwood.info> wrote:
> It amuses me when people know a handful of languages, all clearly derived
> from each other, and think that's "most" languages. That's like somebody
> who knows Dutch, Afrikaans and German[1] being surprised that Russian,
> Cantonese, Hebrew and Vietnamese don't follow the same language rules
> as "most languages".

Until you meet something different, though, you don't realize how
similar they all are to each other. You're too busy noticing how
different they are to see how similar they are. If all you know is
English, you think that British English and American English are very
different, and Australian English is nothing but slang. And then you
meet one of the languages you list above, or even just another Western
European language (all the same letters you know, but maybe one or two
more, like ø or å, and possibly some diacriticals), and suddenly all
English is one language, and even dialects of low Scots become
sufficiently similar that you can read them.

Once you know C, Python, LISP, Perl, and at least one assembly
language, you can understand a lot of code. Correction. You can
understand a lot of programming languages. I would call myself highly
fluent in Python, but I still come across code that makes me go
"WAT?"...

ChrisA