Is Python the Esperanto of programming languages?

[Andy Jewell]

On Thursday 20 Mar 2003 1:52 am, Isaac To wrote:
> >>>>> "Andy" == Andy Jewell <andy at wild-flower.co.uk> writes:
>
>     Andy> Hi Pythonistas, Just thought I'd throw the cat amongst the
>     Andy> pigeons...  I just occurred to me that Python is designed to be
>     Andy> elegant from the ground-up, and takes many of the 'best' features
>     Andy> of many other programming languages, but always with elegance in
>     Andy> mind, similarly to Esperanto, which is designed to be a 'regular'
>     Andy> (i.e. elegant) human language, and draws its vocabulary from many
>     Andy> different spoken languages.
>
> As a native Chinese speaker, I find Esperanto *far* from elegant (with a
> lot of rather stupid redundancy like the need to match the case of
> adjectives and nouns, or even just having the concept of tense). =)
>
> Regards,
> Isaac.

Isaac,

I was, of course, thinking with my 'western' mind.  Our native root languages 
are much different, and I guess the parallel does not work so well with 
languages from the Far East.

I am aware of the difference, though not technically, between especially 
European languages and, say, the Chinese Languages, Japanese and so on.  I 
gather (and I'm sure you'll put me right) that we have many 'redundant' 
filler words, which are not necessary in Chinese.  European languages tend to 
follow the latin format - word ordering, shared words and so on.  English (my 
native tongue) just steals words from other languages and forces them into 
its own odd word-order and gender-free nouns etc.  

In that aspect, I suppose that Python shares very few features with Esperanto.

Thanks,

-andyj