Inflection is a fascinating aspect of language. My native language is Portuguese that just like Spanish and French (and I believe all modern Latin languages), uses a lot of inflection, for both nouns (declension) and verbs (conjugation). Even native speakers, I can tell you, suffer a little in school to get all these rules right :) remarkably because some forms are archaic, never used in colloquial language.
The curious thing is that, if we accept the common-sense that inflection makes language more complex, then we must realize that languages have evolved from complex to simple - just the opposite of what you would expect. 2,500 years ago, Latin used inflection much more heavily than any modern, widely-used language. And 3,500 years ago, Sanskrit was a radically inflected language, even more than Latin - up to the point that Sanskrit poets had the advantage of being allowed to rearrange the words of a sentence in any order they wanted because it would never change the meaning, as the role of each word and the relationships between words in a sentence are always clear from inflection. Maybe in human languages, just like programming languages, complexity does not result from cultural sophistication - it results from empirical growing rather than proper design. Inflection may seem like a clever idea, but it boils down to 1) creating specialized variants of each root word for different scenarios like time, person and number; and 2) coalescing these variants to some regular patterns, so the memorization becomes easier for each new group of words. It's a natural process, that we can easily visualize working in primitive cultures. (But IANAP - I'm not a philologist.) This remembers me of the proliferation of BASIC dialects in the 80's, remarkably in now-classic 8-bit microcomputers: there was no concept of libraries/APIs and no mechanism for extensibility, so the full power of the programming environment was in the language's set of built-in functions (primitive keywords). I remember reading articles that compared competing BASICs and picked the "best" based in the richest set of built-in functions for string manipulation, maths, graphics or I/O. In contrast, you have languages that have a proper design, like Lisp or Smalltalk as the canonical examples, which number of primitive operations or keywords can be counted in your fingers, but the language is still much more powerful than others because their primitive core is entirely optimized for composition. And even after decades of the evolution of our programmer's culture, these "simple" languages, along with the paradigm they espouse (metaprogramming, functional-purism etc.), are still making slow progress towards adoption, mostly via influencing "pragmatic" languages that, each 10 years, make another baby step towards 1959... A+ Osvaldo -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/javaposse/-/ce5e3x0n6TcJ. To post to this group, send email to javaposse@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
