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> At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told. If all we had was Cobol as the One
by xelxebar 9y ago
> At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told.
If all we had was Cobol as the One True Programming Language, we sure would have saved a lot of time reimplementing things. Would we also have missed out on anything important though?
Calling multilingualism a barrier between people seems a bit myopic to me. What about all anthropologic richness that language diversity teaches us? What about the stuff it's taught us about human psychology? What about the cooperative understanding that is built between people through the act itself of learning a language?
- runeks 9y ago> If all we had was Cobol as the One True Programming Language, we sure would have saved a lot of time reimplementing things. Would we also have missed out on anything important though? The question is: do we use programming languages to share ideas and tell stories, or do we use them to get computers to do stuff for us? The only reason COBOL is a useful language is because there exists a translator (compiler), that can transform COBOL into a language spoken by all CPUs (machine code). In that sense, COBOL is more a dialect of assembly than a separate language. And it’s only useful because it’s a dialect of this common language — assembly.
- marcosdumay 9y ago> do we use programming languages to share ideas and tell stories, or do we use them to get computers to do stuff for us? Well, it's both of them, just like spoken language Another question is: is the diversity among our spoken languages large enough for this to even matter? My impression is that any single language has enough internal diversity to host any number of paradigms, but they don't change enough to allow for much different things.