languages et al.

[Edward Cherlin]

On Nov 24, 2007 5:31 PM, Ed Montgomery <edm at rocketmail.com> wrote:

> The really scary people are like James Platt (who,
> unfortunately is no longer with us), on the OED team,
> who was famously quoted as saying:
>
> consulted "linguistic advisers," such as James Platt
> "who knew scores of languages

I had a high school teacher like that. We were pretty sure he could
speak more than 20 languages, although we never asked. Every year or
two he would take up another, learning in part by teaching the
extracurricular Language Club. I learned a bit of Swahili and Chinese
this way.

> and once famously
> declared that the first twelve tongues were always the
> most difficult, but having mastered them, the
> following hundred should not pose too much of a
> problem."

I have said the same thing about computer languages. You should know
how to express the common algorithms and data structures in LISP,
FORTH, APL, Smalltalk, SQL (or better still QBE), and some more
conventional language like C or Python in order to understand what it
is possible to say, and have some idea how to say it given different
kinds of facilities. After that, almost everything is an instance of
something you know well. Programmers used to be mostly aggressively
monolingual in the days of FORTRAN and COBOL, but you can't operate
that way anymore, what with XML (LISP with named parentheses), various
scripting languages, and the like.

-- 
Edward Cherlin
Earth Treasury: End Poverty at a Profit
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Earth_Treasury
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay