Python vs. PHP (& Java?)

[Alex Martelli]

"Moshe Zadka" <moshez at zadka.site.co.il> wrote in message
news:mailman.978059571.14515.python-list at python.org...
> On Thu, 28 Dec 2000, Kemp Randy-W18971 <Randy.L.Kemp at motorola.com> wrote:
>
> > 1.  Could we argue that English is a better language to use around the
world
> >     then French or Spanish?
>
> Yes. Personally, I think that would be wrong -- English has a very
> hard to learn spelling system.

...but it partly compensates with simpler grammar.  Not quite 'a wash',
IMHO, but these things count...

When a given communications-set is only-written, or only-spoken, the
complexities in written<->spoken correspondence-laws matter little.

This is a limit case, sure, but it does happen: you'll likely never
learn just how exotic my English pronunciation is, as long as our
interactions remain confined to email, news, &c; if my spelling is
reasonable, even if I'm unsure about how most of the vowel clusters
are to be spoken, you won't know about my doubts.  Vice versa, I am
unlikely to have any idea about how strong Woody Allen's spelling
skills may be, despite my familiariy with his pronunciation, since I
don't get to see his written materials before copy-editing.

Grammar is more pervasive.  With many English verbs, for example,
you get away with as little as four separate spellings/word forms -
'dream', 'dreams', 'dreamed', 'dreaming' (plus auxiliary utility
words such as 'to' for the infinite, 'will/shall' for the future,
and so on, but those are shared between different verbs).  It is
not _all_ that hard to learn and apply the rules, e.g., "the -s
form is for third person singular present-tense, only" -- they are
also shared between verbs.  Contrast with the situation in Latin
derived languages, including French, Spanish, Italian: typically
six forms (depending on 1st/2nd/3rd person, singular/plural) per
tense -- "sogno, sogni, sogna; sognamo, sognate, sognano" -- and
that is just the present indicative tense of 'to dream' in Italian.

Here (as in Latin, and differently from French) subject-pronoun is
mostly omitted, so you have to recognize the verb form in order to
even understand WHO I'm saying is dreaming -- 'sognamo' (we dream)
and 'sognano' (they dream) being a well-known source of difficulty
for foreign-mother-tongue speakers, particularly in the written
form (the distinction relies just about totally on syllable stress,
'sOgnano' for the 3rd person plural vs 'sognAmo' for the 1st person
plural -- people whose mother-tongue doesn't give syllable stress
much or any phonematic significance have a particularly hard time).


OK, just one simple example.  It is one defensible thesis that
each natural language tends to evolve to some (vaguely defined)
"constant overall complexity" -- if historical evolution leads to
some simplification somewhere, compensating complexities appear
elsewhere (although I guess _causation_ could be the other way
'round!-).  Think of it as a linguistic version of Parkinson's
law about the time it takes for any given task tending to expand
or contract to fit just about the time that is available for it...
for example, modern living languages tend to have many examples
of simplification (along various different axes) compared to
what we know of their ancestor-forms -- one possibility is that
this is compensated by a vastly expanded vocabulary (particularly,
passive-vocabulary) of today's typical speaker when compared with,
say, the typical speaker of 1000 or 2000 years ago (here I'm
threading on *particularly* contentious ground, so I strongly
urge all readers NOT to be content with my glib summaries, but
to read up on their own about these issues, if they have any
interest for them).


Alex