Is Python the Esperanto of programming languages?

Greg Ewing (using news.cis.dfn.de) me at privacy.net
Thu Mar 20 20:57:27 EST 2003


Konrad Hinsen wrote:
> Every natural language has redundancy, and it can be argued that this is a 
> necessary feature for communication in non-optimal conditions.

I don't know much about Chinese, but from what I've heard
it's largely lacking things like genders, singular/plural
distinctions, agreements, etc. If that's true, it would
seem to be a lot less redundant than most European languages.
Yet Chinese people seem to use it quite successfully as
a natural language.

So is redundancy (at the grammatical level, at least) so
necessary in a natural language after all?

An analogy with Python (just to inject a tiny bit of
on-topicness) might be the way Python seems to do without
much of the extraneous punctuation (semicolons, curly
braces, etc.) that other languages seem to be so fond
of. Python demonstrates that you don't really need such
things, and in fact the code can be clearer without
them.

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept,
University of Canterbury,	
Christchurch, New Zealand
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg





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