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Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

The name for what you're talking about is "morphological typology". Languages occupy a spectrum from analytic (words stay the same) to synthetic (words change). English is usually categorized as analytic, since we only have a few ways to change words: plural -s, past tense -ed, etc., and English has been getting more analytic over time. Other European languages are more synthetic (fusional), like French, German, Spanish, etc. Japanese, Finnish, Hungarian are very synthetic (agglutinative). Chinese (all varieties) is on the opposite end of the spectrum, and it's much more analytic than English.

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Interesting. Considering language as a lever and a tool for thought, how do you think the position of a language on the analytic/synthetic spectrum affects its suitability for computer interpretation?

Are there any major Japanese programming languages? It would seem to me that given our relatively primitive compilers, that 'analytic' languages offer simpler mediums for unambiguous programming, whereas 'synthetic' languages may bear greater nuance of expression when we can 'think' programs into existence in the future.

I advise extreme caution when going down this path... it's rife with established lines of pseudoscientific thought. For example, a couple centuries ago you could talk about how English just isn't complex enough to express great ideas the way Latin and Greek are.

Ambiguity is an orthogonal concept to morphological typology, however. There is no extra "nuance of expression" just because you conjugate words more, that's just nonsense.

There's one pretty famous and you may already know it.

> Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

> He has often said that he is “trying to make Ruby natural, not simple,” in a way that mirrors life.

> Building on this, he adds: Ruby is simple in appearance, but is very complex inside, just like our human body.

These will not be considered strictly scientific articles, but appear reasonable..

[http://carlosplusplus.github.io/blog/2013/08/01/ruby-and-the...] - [https://robots.thoughtbot.com/learning-japanese-the-rubyist-...]

Ruby comes from Japan

>Interesting. Considering language as a lever and a tool for thought, how do you think the position of a language on the analytic/synthetic spectrum affects its suitability for computer interpretation?

Interesting question. I remember reading article many years ago in BYTE magazine, someone, maybe one of the regular columnists who wrote about programming languages, speculating that if a programming language came out of the Orient, it might be different in some interesting ways from existing ones, which mainly came from the West, I suppose, though of course there could have been Oriental contributors to existing ones. For a long time after that I never heard of any such language; then came Ruby.

Well, APL is damned near polysynthetic, if that's your bag. But like Cree or Ojibwe, you won't really "speak" it fully, fluently and with nuance until adolescence.

> English is usually categorized as analytic, since we only have a few ways to change words

Words can be stressed in many different ways in an English sentence, and the pattern of stresses in a sentence determines much of the meaning in the surrounding context that isn't communicated by word inflections such as -s and -ed. In programming languages, this would be equivalent to marking up identifiers in different ways (using bolding, italicizing, underlining, etc) instead of using prefix, suffix, and circumfix syntax operators and punctuation.

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