structure of languages (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @02:35PM EDT (#267)
What about the reliance on word order vs. inflections. English grammar is very strongly word order based, to be contrasted with for instance latin (for example in any first year latin textbook it will be pointed out with some silly sentance like 'the boy gives the flowers to the girl' in the latin the word order does not effect the sense, only the emphasis, whereas that sentance in english is very different from any other ordering of it (the flowers give the girl to the boy)).
Structually, programming languages seem very much based on order as well. Of course its not at all clear that the kinds of things dealt with in programming have different roles which can be categorized into a relatively small number of categories, the way nouns can be objects or subjects, etc. but nor is at all clear that they don't. Perhaps if English were not the language that they are all based on such non-positional structure would exist
Most people from India are DBA's (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @02:20PM EDT (#233)
...and that's the truth!
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
Most people from Africa are NEGROS (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @02:45PM EDT (#302)
..and that's the truth!
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
Re:Most people posting to SLASHDOT are MORONS! (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @09:51PM EDT (#655)
...and that's the truth!
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
Re:India (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @02:29PM EDT (#252)
how many indian athletes or artists do you know? they are technically inclined.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
Re:India (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16, @01:23AM EDT (#722)
Hey Chootia, Have you ever heard of Sachin Tendulkar? Probably the worlds best cricket player. (Cricket incidently is a sport watched by nearly 2 billion people for you dumb yanks).
There are more than 25 languages in india (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @03:41PM EDT (#396)
There are more than 25 languages in india of course each with its own script. Each Script is based on sound procduced. usually the first 10 start from base of throat, next 10 start from base of tongue, next 10 from mid tongue, next 10 from tip of tongue, 10 misc sound. Each language has about 50-60 characters.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
Every guy know a minimum of 3 languages (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @03:45PM EDT (#405)
Thats the divercity of the country.
Re:India (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @07:36PM EDT (#599)
It has do to more with the learning system than the language itself. They have to learn English and their own language. They have a lot of math and logic classes. So there are many people with excellent logic thinking plus English speaker.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
Re:India (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16, @03:50AM EDT (#744)
India also has an incredible number of languages. Maybe they feel at home with so many different programming languages.
Re:India (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @01:33PM EDT (#33)
Or technical education.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
they speak English in India (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @02:00PM EDT (#154)
from the CIA's World Factbook "English enjoys associate status but is the most important language for national, political, and commercial communication"
Re:Japanese Perl: syntax example (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @03:54PM EDT (#420)
Would we continue to use the hungarian notation when programming? Or would we adapt that to the specific country... This could affect readability more than common syntax.
Re:Japanese Perl (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @05:23PM EDT (#522)
Another strange thing is the observation that the process of reading English and reading Japanese - two languages which seem to have nothing in common - are virtually identical from a neurological standpoint. Japanese people read words from glyphs (kanji) that symbolize a concept. You might think that English speaking people read every letter and sound out the word, but except for beginners they don't. English speakers read basically the same way as japanese people do - they look at the shape of the word and maybe one or two letters and derive the meaning from that. (This is why English-speaking people still recognize a word even if it is mispelled - they aren't actually looking at all the letters.)
Re:latin-based programming... (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @03:38PM EDT (#394)
Actually there is (was) programming language in Latin: kleio. It's a query language for a hierarchically structured database. It's mostly used by historiy scientists (good for getting family relations out of ancient domuments' transscripts i.e. Gandalf is the nephew of Thorndal who sold a wineyard to...). Recent versions have abandoned latin, though.
Re:it would be incomprehensible! (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @10:49PM EDT (#682)
We had a guy from Quebec who wrote much of the backend of our site.
All his variables and all the comments were in French, for "job security reasons".
Then he quit:-(
Re:It won't matter (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @03:29PM EDT (#379)
Erm, how is this comment insightful? Obvsiouly C and Perl are just higher level abstractions. What matters is *how* they provide higher level representations of instructions. Just as language influences the way the think, programming languages influence the programs we create. -Miller Peterson
Re:It won't matter (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @02:42PM EDT (#290)
Wrong the first language is not assembly!
The first language would more likely be defined by turing automata, or finite automata or Church's lambda-calculus.
So you will see the language of programming is the language of mathematic.
Re:It won't matter (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @01:39PM EDT (#58)
Yes, but even the opcodes in assembler are abbreviations of english words... like ZAP for Zero Add Pack... (It's been over a decade since I did assembler on IBM mainframes in college... that's the only opcode I could remember off the top of my head!) Assembler opcodes are just symbollic names for the machine language opcodes, but very few people want to program in straight machine language (or assembler any more, for that matter). I fondly recall digging thru core dump printouts, and having to translate the hex opcodes to figure out where the problem was... -dc the ac
you guys are a hoot (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @06:23PM EDT (#68)
you guys are a hoot. you're all hot and heavy over an operating system. the future of os's is transparency. have fun wasting your time tricking out your linux os. 99.99% of the rest of the world doesn't care about the os. they care about the software they run. they want the os to be invisible and never have to think about how the computer works.
do i care about the inner workings of a door knob? no. i just want it to get me through the door. meanwhile, you guys spend your time making your knobs turn smoother, forging your own metal plates, etc. yep. have fun tweaking while the world passes you by.
The Outing of Bowie J. Poag (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @08:17PM EDT (#207)
Propaganda suddenly becomes anti-gay propaganda. Do you really think this will cause anyone to visit your web site? Your artsy fartsy backdrops appeal mostly to queers anyway, so apparently you don't value your clientele. I don't think you will be getting very many hits for a while, and I doubt that Jacqui would approve. The Kennedys will certainly withdraw their sponsorship of your project. But you may be able to get Trick Dicky and Pat.
Bowie, who is hosting your web site? Seems that you have your own.org again, no longer being hosted by a public institution? So now it is alright to go gay-bashing.
Zip it up, offer an apology, and get back in your closet! I will still be there if you take your hand off it.
Re:NT isn't fun to admin! (Score:1)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @06:52PM EDT (#120)
Hmm, I have also worked as an NT admin (only about 20 machines, in a training centre) and from my experience I'd say that your lack of NT knowledge is the problem here. Yup, things don't work right if you don't install correctly in the first place.
If you have to hit the power button to solve problems then you DO NOT know what you are doing (or dodgy hardware). In 18 months I never had a situation where I had to hit the power button - this was with users with zero computer experience.
Of course, with win9x often the easiest/quickest way is to hit the power (and often that was the only way to solve problems at the same centre). But 9x isn't NT and the win9x hardware wasn't quality kit.
The important thing is that someone who knows what they are doing fixes the problems, otherwise they easily get worse.
[Qualifications don't prove shit in the real-world.]
Re:Who runs an untweaked NT? (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @10:36PM EDT (#307)
Large govt. enterprise. Afraid to reimage servers - because they might not be the same afterwards. Security patches go on before testing. Some servers now 2 years old. what dangers here? multiply by 300. Security will win out to the system that can complete clean reinstall the fastest.Security is a process not a product. b.
Re:Possible right conclusion, definite wrong reaso (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14, @12:05AM EDT (#373)
Secondly, I can pretty much guarantee that if a nice sizeable Fortune 500 gets whacked hard just once, there will be a suit. They will win.
The Fortune 500 company for which I work had its entire email infrastructure whacked for a week due to problems with MS Exchange. A trivial misconfiguration at one site spread like a virus (and don't get me started on the Outlook viruses with which we are also afflicted) to the rest of the email servers worldwide, halving productivity for a week. Not only is there no suit against Microsoft, the CIO in describing the failure wouldn't even mention Microsoft by name as the source of the problem. MS is not getting whacked; instead we are throwing more money at them for Exchange 2000, and migrating away from the few remaining SMTP servers (which remained functional throughout the Exchange collapse).
I wish your guarantee of a suit for shoddy software were true, but in my experience that has not been the case.
Re:Possible right conclusion, definite wrong reaso (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @09:11PM EDT (#246)
Thanks for the incite, and a list reasons rather then rhetoric. Us Linux people should be taking these comments on board if we ever want Linux to be successful in the corporate world. Getting all defensive and childish will do nothing to improve Linux's position, you can be sure that M$ people listen to criticism and attempt to change their processes and product. Until we learn the same thing, we don't have a chance, and will be relegated to being a toy geeks play with......possibly that is what most of you want.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the design documents where released to allow creation home made do-it-yourself machines able to play Atari games.
Look here. I wonder how existing ROMs can be put on catridges...
structure of languages (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @02:35PM EDT (#267)
What about the reliance on word order vs. inflections. English grammar is very strongly word order based, to be contrasted with for instance latin (for example in any first year latin textbook it will be pointed out with some silly sentance like 'the boy gives the flowers to the girl' in the latin the word order does not effect the sense, only the emphasis, whereas that sentance in english is very different from any other ordering of it (the flowers give the girl to the boy)).
Structually, programming languages seem very much based on order as well. Of course its not at all clear that the kinds of things dealt with in programming have different roles which can be categorized into a relatively small number of categories, the way nouns can be objects or subjects, etc. but nor is at all clear that they don't. Perhaps if English were not the language that they are all based on such non-positional structure would exist
Re:What about slang? (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @04:04PM EDT (#440)
Where do you think Valgol's fer-sher loop came from?
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
Re:What about slang? (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @04:30PM EDT (#467)
Instead of throwing an exception, you could just bitchslap it to the next higher level pimp to catch.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
Re:What about slang? (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @05:00PM EDT (#506)
And "this" would be "up in here."
Word.
Most people from India are DBA's (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @02:20PM EDT (#233)
...and that's the truth!
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
Most people from Africa are NEGROS (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @02:45PM EDT (#302)
..and that's the truth!
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
Re:Most people posting to SLASHDOT are MORONS! (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @09:51PM EDT (#655)
...and that's the truth!
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
Re:India (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @02:29PM EDT (#252)
how many indian athletes or artists do you know? they are technically inclined.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
Re:India (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16, @01:23AM EDT (#722)
Hey Chootia, Have you ever heard of Sachin Tendulkar? Probably the worlds best cricket player. (Cricket incidently is a sport watched by nearly 2 billion people for you dumb yanks).
There are more than 25 languages in india (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @03:41PM EDT (#396)
There are more than 25 languages in india of course each with its own script. Each Script is based on sound procduced. usually the first 10 start from base of throat, next 10 start from base of tongue, next 10 from mid tongue, next 10 from tip of tongue, 10 misc sound. Each language has about 50-60 characters.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
Every guy know a minimum of 3 languages (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @03:45PM EDT (#405)
Thats the divercity of the country.
Re:India (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @07:36PM EDT (#599)
It has do to more with the learning system than the language itself. They have to learn English and their own language. They have a lot of math and logic classes. So there are many people with excellent logic thinking plus English speaker.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
Re:India (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16, @03:50AM EDT (#744)
India also has an incredible number of languages. Maybe they feel at home with so many different programming languages.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
Re:India (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @01:33PM EDT (#33)
Or technical education.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
they speak English in India (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @02:00PM EDT (#154)
from the CIA's World Factbook "English enjoys associate status but is the most important language for national, political, and commercial communication"
Re:Snow Crash (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @05:27PM EDT (#527)
Yes, but unfortunately Chomsky formulated those theories AFTER he went mad...
Re:Snow Crash (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @02:24PM EDT (#239)
BASIC might be okay for brownies, but when I cook a big dinner I need concurrency - steam the rice while the meat marinates and I chop salad.
Re:Japanese Perl: syntax example (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @03:54PM EDT (#420)
Would we continue to use the hungarian notation when programming? Or would we adapt that to the specific country... This could affect readability more than common syntax.
Re:Japanese Perl: syntax example (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16, @01:21AM EDT (#721)
German acutally allows "OVS" sentences too. For example, "Perl lerne ich" (I learn perl) is okay
Re:Slavonic C (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @09:53PM EDT (#657)
Hey, "I don't have no money" means "I don't have any money" in English too!
;)
Re:Japanese Perl (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @05:23PM EDT (#522)
Another strange thing is the observation that the process of reading English and reading Japanese - two languages which seem to have nothing in common - are virtually identical from a neurological standpoint. Japanese people read words from glyphs (kanji) that symbolize a concept. You might think that English speaking people read every letter and sound out the word, but except for beginners they don't. English speakers read basically the same way as japanese people do - they look at the shape of the word and maybe one or two letters and derive the meaning from that. (This is why English-speaking people still recognize a word even if it is mispelled - they aren't actually looking at all the letters.)
Re:latin-based programming... (Score:0)
...). Recent versions have abandoned latin, though.
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @03:38PM EDT (#394)
Actually there is (was) programming language in Latin: kleio. It's a query language for a hierarchically structured database. It's mostly used by historiy scientists (good for getting family relations out of ancient domuments' transscripts i.e. Gandalf is the nephew of Thorndal who sold a wineyard to
See Descripton
Re:it would be incomprehensible! (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @10:49PM EDT (#682) We had a guy from Quebec who wrote much of the backend of our site. All his variables and all the comments were in French, for "job security reasons". Then he quit :-(
Re:It won't matter (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @03:29PM EDT (#379)
Erm, how is this comment insightful? Obvsiouly C and Perl are just higher level abstractions. What matters is *how* they provide higher level representations of instructions. Just as language influences the way the think, programming languages influence the programs we create. -Miller Peterson
Re:It won't matter (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @02:42PM EDT (#290) Wrong the first language is not assembly! The first language would more likely be defined by turing automata, or finite automata or Church's lambda-calculus. So you will see the language of programming is the language of mathematic.
Re:It won't matter (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15, @01:39PM EDT (#58)
Yes, but even the opcodes in assembler are abbreviations of english words... like ZAP for Zero Add Pack... (It's been over a decade since I did assembler on IBM mainframes in college... that's the only opcode I could remember off the top of my head!) Assembler opcodes are just symbollic names for the machine language opcodes, but very few people want to program in straight machine language (or assembler any more, for that matter). I fondly recall digging thru core dump printouts, and having to translate the hex opcodes to figure out where the problem was... -dc the ac
you guys are a hoot (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @06:23PM EDT (#68)
you guys are a hoot. you're all hot and heavy over an operating system. the future of os's is transparency. have fun wasting your time tricking out your linux os. 99.99% of the rest of the world doesn't care about the os. they care about the software they run. they want the os to be invisible and never have to think about how the computer works.
do i care about the inner workings of a door knob? no. i just want it to get me through the door. meanwhile, you guys spend your time making your knobs turn smoother, forging your own metal plates, etc. yep. have fun tweaking while the world passes you by.
The Outing of Bowie J. Poag (Score:0)
.org again, no longer being hosted by a public institution? So now it is alright to go gay-bashing.
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @08:17PM EDT (#207)
Propaganda suddenly becomes anti-gay propaganda. Do you really think this will cause anyone to visit your web site? Your artsy fartsy backdrops appeal mostly to queers anyway, so apparently you don't value your clientele. I don't think you will be getting very many hits for a while, and I doubt that Jacqui would approve. The Kennedys will certainly withdraw their sponsorship of your project. But you may be able to get Trick Dicky and Pat.
Bowie, who is hosting your web site? Seems that you have your own
Zip it up, offer an apology, and get back in your closet! I will still be there if you take your hand off it.
The customer is always right!
Re:NT isn't fun to admin! (Score:1)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @06:52PM EDT (#120)
Hmm, I have also worked as an NT admin (only about 20 machines, in a training centre) and from my experience I'd say that your lack of NT knowledge is the problem here. Yup, things don't work right if you don't install correctly in the first place.
If you have to hit the power button to solve problems then you DO NOT know what you are doing (or dodgy hardware). In 18 months I never had a situation where I had to hit the power button - this was with users with zero computer experience.
Of course, with win9x often the easiest/quickest way is to hit the power (and often that was the only way to solve problems at the same centre). But 9x isn't NT and the win9x hardware wasn't quality kit.
The important thing is that someone who knows what they are doing fixes the problems, otherwise they easily get worse.
[Qualifications don't prove shit in the real-world.]
Re:Who runs an untweaked NT? (Score:0)
.Security is a process not a product. b.
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @10:36PM EDT (#307)
Large govt. enterprise. Afraid to reimage servers - because they might not be the same afterwards. Security patches go on before testing. Some servers now 2 years old. what dangers here? multiply by 300. Security will win out to the system that can complete clean reinstall the fastest
Re:Perhaps the point he was trying to make... (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @08:17PM EDT (#208)
Well, to do it justice, you can add things onto Windows. My friend has got software to read EXT2 partitions (on win95 only, 98 blocks everything)
Uh huh.. (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @06:38PM EDT (#98)
Wow Peter, that was great...maybe you'd like to try my crack pipe someday, some have said it is the best.
Re:Possible right conclusion, definite wrong reaso (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14, @12:05AM EDT (#373)
Secondly, I can pretty much guarantee that if a nice sizeable Fortune 500 gets whacked hard just once, there will be a suit. They will win.
The Fortune 500 company for which I work had its entire email infrastructure whacked for a week due to problems with MS Exchange. A trivial misconfiguration at one site spread like a virus (and don't get me started on the Outlook viruses with which we are also afflicted) to the rest of the email servers worldwide, halving productivity for a week. Not only is there no suit against Microsoft, the CIO in describing the failure wouldn't even mention Microsoft by name as the source of the problem. MS is not getting whacked; instead we are throwing more money at them for Exchange 2000, and migrating away from the few remaining SMTP servers (which remained functional throughout the Exchange collapse).
I wish your guarantee of a suit for shoddy software were true, but in my experience that has not been the case.
- Anonymous, out of necessity.
Re:Possible right conclusion, definite wrong reaso (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13, @09:11PM EDT (#246)
Thanks for the incite, and a list reasons rather then rhetoric. Us Linux people should be taking these comments on board if we ever want Linux to be successful in the corporate world. Getting all defensive and childish will do nothing to improve Linux's position, you can be sure that M$ people listen to criticism and attempt to change their processes and product. Until we learn the same thing, we don't have a chance, and will be relegated to being a toy geeks play with......possibly that is what most of you want.