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."

Comments

Re:Hard To Believe

[Manax]

You are entirely missing the point.

The idea is that other languages embody higher-order logics that we haven't yet discovered in western cultures. Consequently, when a language is lost, we've lost another opportunity to learn those logics and apply them to programming.

Now, personally, I find the idea silly. The paper that is linked from the article is pretty deep, and talking about Sanskrit particularly, which has a long history, and a lot of deep algorithmic aspects. Most of the languages that are disappearing are tiny languages, which may be interesting in their own right, but probably wouldn't revolutionize programming...

Also personally, it's too bad that these languages are disappearing, if in fact they are. However, I'm all in favor of languages becoming unused. Culling the herd and all that... but each language is a piece of our culture, and I'd personally like them to be archived, so that in a hundred years, we can use our holodecks to recreate a civilization that has been gone for a thousand years, complete with clothing, hair styles, technology and language. :) But that's just me.

Re:English is the world language (maybe)

[ackthpt]

Now, we aren't anywhere close to having a world language, but I think that within 100 years English will be the primary language of everybody.

And which 'english' with that be?

The US Southern Drawl

The US Northern US 'Ya sure ya betcha'

The Queen's

The commoners

The Aussie

The Canadian, eh!

Those of us who like to say 'virii' and are relentlessly persecuted by fascist AC's

Valley Girl

etc.

I think the whole thing is a myth, languages may be going away, but as language is dynamic, new dialects or variations appear and will continue to diverge. For the most part we have some idea what the other is saying, but as new meanings or words come out of a small population and someone doesn't understand it, you still have the very mechanics which created all the languages in the first place.