>Ok, I'm not sure if this is true or not, but I was having a
>conversation with a linguist, who explained that one of the reasons
>that english is used so frequently is the redundancy, and the fact
>that, for most uses, it uses the least sylabels(Ok, I mangled the
>spelling on that. If an admin wants to stalinize it, go for it.) of
>any language.

I cannot make any sense out of that. The redundancy actually makes it *harder* to learn -- English is one of the most idiomatic languages around, surpassed only by Japanese and Chinese to my knowledge, and there's four or five substantial variations that see a fair amount of use. (An Australian who speaks with a great deal of Australian slang will probably sound like he's speaking a foreign language.)

>I could also point to lojban, which is the only language that I know
>that can express time travel, from the third person after the fact,
>without breaking down into tears. And it's just fun to speak a
>language that looks like code when written out. Hey! There's an idea!
>we'll all use some bastardized version of Perl to communicate in the
>future! Yeah!

Um. Lojban is painful to learn and speak. While it's certainly interesting as an intellectual exercise, it's nigh-useless for anything else.

As for Perl...
Random Usenet Poster: "That's not encrypted. That's in Perl."
Larry Wall: "You just contradicted yourself."

I like Perl. I intend to learn Perl. But it's not exactly the easiest language to figure out just by looking at code.

-- Sean --

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