Hacker News Reader

To continue your analogies, German would probably be Rust (german grammar is strict and pretty inflexible but leads to correct linguistic output), and Mandarin would be C++ ( because you have to learn so much syntax before you can do anything). (no offense to anyone)

View on HN

I would think Mandarin would be closer to perl, no? The grammar and syntax are quite reasonable (as a native English speaker), but the character set is difficult to memorize and write. Doubly so if you go somewhere that prefers traditional characters over the simplified characters.

Word order isn't too flexible or wild, and aside from measure words, there aren't really any modifiers or compounds like romance language gendered words or German's obscenely long nouns.

If you want to make an analogy to a language that uses a strange character set, I’d point you at APL.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com