What language scares you?

[threaded]

Finnish is a pretty bizarre language.

But not as difficult as one might initially imagine.

For a native English speaker it is said that Danish is actually the hardest to learn.

threaded in "juoksentelisinkohan" mode

[gingerjedi]

Glaswegian.

[moorfield]

Spin

[Menelaus]

Dari / Pashtu (I'm working up a thesis at the moment where a lot of the source material is in Dari)

[thunderlizard]

Georgian is pretty hardcore.

[NickFitz]

Brainfsck

[suityou01]

VB.Net scares the bejesus out of me. No literal operator, handles keyword, the Dim keyword. The stuff of nightmares.

[TimberWolf]

Brainfsck

That is impressive. A 200 byte compiler for a language that is as as powerful as any ever written (in the sense of what it can compute, not its efficiency) and consisting of only 8 primitive instructions.

[TimberWolf]

DNA uses an interesting and probably scary language. A DNA molecule consists of a long string of the 4 bases A, C, T, G (billions of them making up each molecule) and these specify the sequence in which the 20 amino acids that make up all ~30,000 forms of protein and polypeptides in a human. Almost everything we are and do seems to involve blindly copying sequences of DNA and RNA over and over again.

It turns out that these letters (ACTG) are arranged in groups of three to specify each amino acid. This allows 64 combinations (4^3) of amino acids to be specified, but as we only need 20, redundancy is used cleverly such that copying errors are likely to be non-fatal or alternatives specifications of the correct amino acid.

That was the interesting part, the rest is probably scary.

[thelace]

Welsh!

Scrabble without the vowels?