Esperanto is certainly not better than English; and I really doubt Lua is better than Javascript.
Doesn't that depend on how one decides to "score" a language? And I think that's what the author is getting at, too.
Well at least the idea comes through, but I don't think it makes sense to argue whether Lua is actually better than JavaScript or not.
So when we go back to this:
> Esperanto is certainly not better than English; and I really doubt Lua is better than Javascript
All I get from it is "I personally have a strong opinion about what makes a language 'better'". Nothing wrong with that, but it's independent from the argument made by TFA. Perhaps I misinterpreted.
Not as much, because not all ways of scoring a language are as good either, and in the ways of scoring that matter, English is better than Esperanto.
You've never dealt with Esperantists, I can tell.
also the irregularities in english developed over centuries by contact with other languages in an environment that lacked the normative influence of globalization and modern communication tools.
at the time english was also not the defacto language for international communication that it is today. this status is responsible for efforts such as a wikipedia in basic english that makes information easier to approach by non-native speakers.
as esperanto was expressly created with the goal of being an international language, any attempts to introduce irregularities will meet a lot more resistance and therefore development of an irregular grammar is unlikely to happen.
That's the problem. It's design by commitee instead of evolutionary organic design. It's how cyborgs think people oughta talk.
I feel you understand the author' point but still disagree for some reason.
I'll put the metaphor back to programming. There's programming for quality and programming for financial gain. If your metrics are the latter, then Javascript is the best language. But many people here do think as engineers, and thus there are other qualities that "are not as good" ways to score a language but maximize the ability to deliver a stable product.
I loath 1-based indexes though. Just odd.
Consider that in programming, technical docs, even normal writing, it is almost always better to the most important aspect of a name come first. The adjective-noun order in English makes this awkward all the time.
A lot of languages have this property: Germanic languages (incl. English), Slavic languages, Indian languages, most Chinese languages.
Source: https://wals.info/feature/87A#7/18.104/263.320
There are strictly _more_ languages with the opposite order (nouns before adjectives), at least in this dataset, but that seems to be an artifact of the huge number of distinct languages with relatively few speakers documented in Southeast Asia, Papua New Guinea and Africa.
I suspect that weighted by number of speakers, adjective-noun is the most common order globally.
Agreed. Until Esperanto starts having actual native-speaking communities, I will look at it the same way I look at Klingon or Elvish.
that was the point of the OOP, yes. No one cares about quality, but popularity. And OOP feels the same.