C++ would be English. It's hideously complicated and has stolen ideas from a ton of other languages but didn't get any of them right. Even though everyone claims to know it, few people actually know most of the details. There are people who barely know enough of the language to put something together that mostly works -- but that apparently counts as "knowing" it.
Haskell would be Lojban. It makes perfect sense if you've taken the time to learn it, but it looks so damn weird at first that few people bother, and the ones who do usually go around feeling superior and telling everyone else how marvelous it is. Also, it's insistent on staying "pure" to a fault.
Assembly would of course be Latin. It was perfectly suitable at the time it was created, but practically no one speaks it anymore except for a couple of words and phrases.
HTML would be grunting and pointing. It's ok for communicating ideas, but despite what lower-level primates seem to think, it isn't a real language.
XSLT would be sign language. It *is* a real language, but a really annoying one to use. However, about 0.1% of the time it happens to be the right tool for the job.
Lisp would be German. Combining words together to make new words? Same general idea as "cdaddr".
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Anonymous2008-12-19 8:12
Actually, I think LISP would be an agglutinative language like Hungarian. Wikipedia lists the longest word as Töredezettségmentesítőtleníttethetetlenségtelenítőtlenkedhetnétek meaning "you [plural] could constantly mention the lack [of a thing] that makes it impossible to make someone make something defragmenter-free".
It also has pretty weird verb order compared to English, and the verb order can be quite flexible - relations between words are often denoted by case suffixes instead of sentence position. It is also quite confusing to people who know only English. (thinks I (fits this LISP)).
Of course, there's probably some sort of weird polysynthetic language that fits LISP better, but I don't know much about those.
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Anonymous2008-12-19 11:36
Python would be Dutch. Een woord aan de gedwongen inspringen van code thread over.
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Anonymous2008-12-19 11:41
Fjölnir would be stofnlok *
"GRUNNUR"
;
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Anonymous2008-12-19 11:52
>>3
Dutch doesn't have very much whitespace though. Very long words. Maybe something like Vietnamese, because it separates individual syllables with spaces.
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Anonymous2008-12-19 11:56
Clojure would be Novial. Otto Jespersen disliked the arbitrary and artificial character that he found in Esperanto and Ido. Additionally, he objected to those languages' Latin-like systems of inflection, which he found needlessly complex. He sought to make Novial at once euphonious and regular while also preserving useful structures from natural languages.
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Anonymous2008-12-19 12:39
>>6
Good sir, you just managed to make a JVM based language sound attractive. I hope you're proud of yourself.
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62008-12-19 12:41
>>7
I've been trying out Clojure for the past week, and you don't really need bad analogies to make it sound attractive. The only bad thing about JVM is the fact that it is named after one of the most harmful programming languages ever.
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Anonymous2008-12-19 13:17
>>8
Once the JVM gets a tailcall instruction, it will be complete.
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Anonymous2008-12-19 13:26
>>9
I don't really miss it that much. Theoretical wankery aside, loop/recur has been good enough for me this far.
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Anonymous2008-12-19 14:16
>>1 Lisp would be German. Combining words together to make new words? Same general idea as "cdaddr".
That's retarded. You've seized on a totally minor detail. No one even uses anything past perhaps CADR. Lisp is a pretty good candidate for lojban though. Good ideas from other languages have been combined with completely novel and unambiguous syntax.
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Anonymous2008-12-19 14:28
>>11 Good ideas from other languages have been combined with completely novel and unambiguous syntax. Holy fuck! Get your timeline right.
Lisp [...] Good ideas from other languages have been combined with completely novel and unambiguous syntax.
Only that it actually was the other way round: many languages got good ideas from Lisp (Lisp goes back ~ 50 years). Even something as fundamental as the if statement/expression was introduced in Lisp first, see http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html for many more concepts which are now mainstream.
>>18
0/10 for mentioning Paul Graham. Seriously, someone needs to hit that faggot with a bus.
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Anonymous2008-12-19 16:12
>>19
because he's popular or because he's actually done something bad?
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Anonymous2008-12-19 16:52
>>20
Because he wastes all his time writing stupid "OMG LISP IS AWESOME" essays on his domain name that's named after him, instead of actually doing something useful.
Forth would be like Finnish. You end up stacking suffixes on top of other suffixes and in the end around one in two thousand people (or in Forth's case, programmers) might understand what you're saying... if they can remember what the actual word (first three syllables) was (after hearing fifteen syllables worth of suffixes). Chain three of these together and you can express poignant commentary on anything.
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Anonymous2008-12-20 10:46
LISP would be any of the Semitic languages i.e. Hebrew, Arabic, Akkadian...
The Concatenative Languages would be the Germanic Languages.