Richmond Mathewson wrote: > I think that it is probably generally true that the more synonyms > and ways of saying the same thing a language has, the easier it is > to learn. > > This is also borne out by Linguistic research.
Linguistics for communicating with humans follows different rules than the linguistics used for communicating with machines.
Their purpose and scope is vastly different, so it should not be surprising that what is "best" for one isn't necessarily "best" in another.
Indeed, most natural languages have no "best"; only artificial languages like Esperanto and the older Boontling are "designed" at all. Natural languages are multi-millennial accidents-in-the-making.
In stark contrast. programming languages have a very narrow scope, and are not only explicitly designed by necessity, but usually quite narrowly, as they attempt to communicate with a machine too stupid to count past 1.
Consider Python, the world's fourth-most-popular language, and perhaps the leading language for introducing newcomers to programming.
Among the core principles of Python's language design is: "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." - Guido van Rossum <http://python-history.blogspot.com/2009/01/pythons-design-philosophy.html> -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Systems Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web ____________________________________________________________________ ambassa...@fourthworld.com http://www.FourthWorld.com _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
