That is one way of looking at it, but it is not a ranked nor chronological list. The amount of people that belong in the newsletter is vast and the newsletter will eventually cover most of them, in due time. Steve Wilhite’s issue came our shortly after his passing, it felt like a timely release.
Small notes/link manager that will be a standalone page and, hopefully, a browser extension. Sometimes I find myself hoping I could have a list of the links/documents I’m working on at the moment on my New Tab page, so I’m making one. It’s mostly a reason to learn Elm.
Interesting, I feel like I have the opposite issue. Coming from Portuguese, learning Spanish was a breeze and I can usually surprise French speaking people with “hard” words in my basic French sentences — just because I reached out to a Portuguese word and “frenchyfied” it.
Going from native Portuguese, then French, and only then Spanish (yep, I've gone to a crazy school), I got much of the problem the GP was talking about. I don't think I've ever spoken so much French as the time when I was leaning Spanish.
There's something with those two languages in that they interfere badly.
I’m aware not al of them do. This is why I said “many” and not “all”.
There are roughly 3 main groups of European languages: Italic (or Romance as you described it) for Western Europe, Germanic which is predominantly Central Europe, Scandinavian countries and the UK; and Balto-Slavic for Eastern Europe. Generally speaking of course.
However there is still a fair amount of cross pollination even with the Germanic and Italic languages, not to mention shared characteristics (not least of all a shared alphabet) that doesn’t exist with Japonic languages such as, well, Japanese.
