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Extinction Of Human Languages Affects Programming?
Tanmay Kudyadi writes "An article from NewScientist.com reports that half of all human languages will have disappeared by the end of the century, as smaller societies are assimilated into national and global cultures. This may be great news if one is looking at a common standard for communication, but it dosen't help those designing the next generation of programming languages. For example, there's an extremely strong link between Panini's Grammar and computer science (PDF link), and with every language lost, there is a possibility that we may have missed an opportunity at improving the underlying heuristics."
Well.. that dashes all hope I had for finding a papyrus re-issue of "Babylonian C for Dummies". It's been out of print for millennia.
Trolling is a art,
In 200 years, There'll be 637 different words for "bug" in the our universal spoken language, ESPERA~1. To express confusion, a speaker will slap his hands over his face, stand stock still, shout "BLUE!", and wait for the other person to walk away.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Hmm, that's doubleplus ungood...
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
You didn't happen to be visiting England did you?
...strong link between Panini's Grammar and computer science
I knew sandwiches were related to programming!
How exactly is C or Pascal based off a spoken language?
....
while (alive)
while (lust && !state(HUNGER)) {
seek_women(HIGH_PRIORITY);
if (found) {
sex_up(BYPAIRS)
sleep();
} else {
sex_up(MANUALLY);
watch(CARTOONS);
}
}
if (state(HUNGER))
{
seek_food();
if (found) {
chow_down_like_no_tommorow();
} else {
slaughter(NEIGHBOUR);
chow_down_like_is_tommorow();
}
}
}
Oh I get it
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
On the plus side, there are new languages showing up all the time. Klingon, Vulcan, Romulan, Cardassian ....
Imagine the programming possibilities!!!
Great civilizations have lived and died on false theories. Don't mess up mine with a few facts.
I get the feeling that Klingon will end up being better preserved than at least half the languages that could potentially disappear.
As long as PASCAL, COBOL, and C++ are extinct too, I don't care.
with a one-bit bus (our mouth) that's going to be pretty slow.
I suppose we could add ten fingers, two eyes, and three toes to the mouth, and get a 16 bit bus, but that's going to be pretty hard to process. Not to mention it will be half duplex at best, since you'd need your eyes to see the other person communicating. Not to mention that a bit shift could very easily have you firmly planting your foot in your mouth.
Thank you. Thank you. I'll be here all week.
Me extinct English? That's unpossible.
It's called Assembly. Assembly is what lowly humans use because their meat-brains can't keep track of all those 0's an 1's.
Hey baby, wanna Kill All Humans?
Fer ah=1 ta 5
ya'll gosub thingamajig(ah)
iffen error then goto goldangit
next ah
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"Let us ADD our INCOME to our CAPITAL, as the squirrel adds to its autumn horde. Aye, there's the SUM that makes a TOTAL WEALTH. 3000 DUCATS? Is this an EXPENDITURE I see before me? Marry 'tis best 'twere TAKEN AWAY, like as the magpie taketh away the jewel of great price. But hist! Here cometh the INTEREST, and 'tis of no mean interest, i' faith! I had lief ADD a percentage of this, than clasp my fair Rosalind's spleen."
In all reality, as many people have pointed out, there is a large chunk of poetry written in various programming languages, and the inverse is true as well; many human languages are used in forms that are human "programs". Instead of being stored on harddrives, they are published in cookbooks and engineering texts.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Any questions?
Every time I try to comprehend the parent post, I get:
ungood is not an lvalue
Some people are just so hard to understand!
Except for Perl, which is cuneiform for Gibberish.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
The word "algorithm" encripts the name of the first programmer - Al Gore ;-).
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov