I’ve just been on holiday and a few discussions with some Finnish Swedes got me wondering. Apparently Swedish is much more similar to English than Finnish. Finnish has some really strange grammatical constructions apparently. Our conclusions were that English was a Germanic language (heavily influenced by latin). What has this got to do with Perl? Well, the question is. Would modern programming languages have been any different in their structure if they had been entirely developed by Finnish only speaking Finns, for example. How much has the Germanic language form biased the development of Perl? Maybe I should be asking how much the Indo-European language form has biased the development of Perl. Any thoughts welcome.

Also, it is clear that the British are no more similar to the Germans, Swedish, Norwegians, Danish and Austrians than the Spanish, Italians and French. So what was it that drew us to the Germanic language form? What is superior about this form and can we learn from this when developing programming languages? Also, are there any weaknesses in the Germanic language form that leads to weaknesses in programming languages being developed?