On Sat, Aug 6, 2016 at 1:10 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve+pyt...@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 -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
