5 ms·

"Good enough" is a curious notion. I'm an advocate of "good enough" is good enough, but sometimes it can be quite tricky to decide when something is good enough

"Good enough" is a curious notion. I'm an advocate of "good enough" is good enough, but sometimes it can be quite tricky to decide when something is good enough. And if. Sometimes, you figure it out down the road; and you'll be in deep trouble if you find out it wasn't! Anyhow, there have been many "good enough" languages — mostly, it depends on cultural factors. Latin is still present in today's traditional sciences (biology, medicine,) French is the language in arts and cuisine, Italian is dominant in music theory, Greek infests philosophy and logics, as does German, which also has a strong foothold in engineering and mathematics. And what do we learn from that? There is no one language. There cannot be one. At least, we haven't figured out a way. Over time, dominant languages rise and fade. That's why I loved Firefly for incorporating Chinese :-D English will fade (most probably.) Also most probably, it will stay in the computing sector, just like Italian did in the music sector. > there are more students taking SATs in China in ENGLISH than in the US+Britain Yeah, that's like saying more Indians write Java code than Americans. What does it mean? Java is "good enough?" For some tasks, but not for all. That Rome to WWW line of yours is quite eurocentric. Can't put my finger on it, but "American web pages" look different in Asia than they do in the West. The cultural values of ancient Rome had no real influence there — except you mean to imply Babbage influenced C#. My knowledge of LISP doesn't go beyond programming-book examples. I somehow never got into it — I blame Haskell!. But you're certainly mistaken that language recognition is sequential. For all we know, it most likely isn't. And for Chinese, for example, it really definitely isn't. Reading a Chinese poem is reading backwards, across, down, and up at the same time in order to get the full meaning. I don't get how LISP is closer to natural languages than to programming languages? Anyhow, my take on the situation of the OP: if he stays in the sector he's in and doesn't move out before retirement, he's found his last language. Otherwise, different tasks and developments are going to force him to adapt. There is no one best language. We've been trying to find it for thousands of years, and it's been rather fruitless so far.

metamemetics 16y ago
English is and will be the de facto language of globalization. All of the world's elites speak it in every country. People will speak their local language, AND English. I think this is a given. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ftF8sXzoWk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ftF8sXzoWk English will certainly outlast Chinese. The constitution of India is written in English and India will soon far eclipse China in terms of population. I think it's a given, is assumed by most people, and not overly worth arguing > But you're certainly mistaken that language recognition is sequential. The initial input and output of [spoken] language is sequential by definition and structure of the ear and voicebox. I simply meant that you can not speak two words or hear two words at the same time in the manner that you can see two words at the same time. You can see indentation in a text document\program, but you have to add extra syntax in spoken language to convey this. Internal language recognition\parsing is incredibly LISP like. I'll try to add a more detailed explanation of what I mean by this in the future when I have more time. [ basically when the human brain processes information, there are limited resources, right. The working memory buffer for the human brain can only hold 5-7 "chunks" at the same time. You have to resort to the phenomena of "chunking" to process more information. You should find this article very interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology) So basically we use "operators" to chunk things together. We could have a "phrase" operator that chunks a noun, verb, and object together. What's great or genius is that this "phrase", or function, is ALSO a chunk. and you can combine those chunks together in the same manner even if they are functions. This is like LISP: functions are data and data are functions. This is the "big deal" about LISP. It's similar to in the human brain, where everything is a "chunk". As long as you have processed sub-ideas into a chunk and have given a name for that chunk, you can start wielding bigger ideas. ] [ Spoken languages are all GOOD and reflective of human thought. Anyone is GOOD ENOUGH. The differences between spoken languages are small. The differences between LISP programming languages and non-LISP programming languages are vast. LISP is to thought as Python is to English. LISP is the most similar to an evolutionarily evolved structure (human thought). Therefore a LISP implementation could also share high survivability. And could survive longer than a human lifespan. ]
- astrange 16y ago
  > What's great or genius is that this "phrase", or function, is ALSO a chunk. and you can combine those chunks together in the same manner even if they are functions. This is like LISP: functions are data and data are functions. These two sentences have no apparent relation, except that you said they did. Spoken language sentences do not evaluate each other and none of them are apparently functions. Also, spoken languages don't have punctuation…
  - silentbicycle 16y ago
    I think (s)he's saying that human languages have composable, tree-like structures. There's nothing Lisp-specific about that, though. Prolog would work just as well, or ML (human languages may be statically typed), Joy, etc. Also, I'm an amateur linguist at best, but the recursive structures in human languages generally don't get more than a couple levels deep - the linguistic stack seems to get smashed pretty easily.
    - metamemetics 16y ago
      > but the recursive structures in human languages generally don't get more than a couple levels deep - the linguistic stack seems to get smashed pretty easily. Sentences yes (figure 7 chunk limit), semantic associations tokened by words, no.
  - metamemetics 16y ago
    > Spoken language sentences do not evaluate each other and none of them are apparently functions I tried to clarify the proper analogy at the end. LISP is not directly analogous to spoken language (the surface level), LISP is directly analogous to human thought (that interprets language internally). This was really the topic for an article and not a comment rant, sorry.
- bad_user 16y ago
  If I'm hungry I would say "Hey, give me a Hot Dog". I wouldn't be drawing diagrams of synapses and how the chemical signals flow when I'm thinking about that Hot Dog. The issue of language parsing and how Lisp-like it is, it's incredibly irrelevant.
loewenskind 16y ago
>There is no one language. There cannot be one. Especially when you consider that language isn't just spoken words. It's a whole way of thinking. A big part of the culture itself. That's not going to just die off because English speakers are too lazy to learn any other languages.

metamemetics 16y ago

English is and will be the de facto language of globalization. All of the world's elites speak it in every country. People will speak their local language, AND English. I think this is a given. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ftF8sXzoWk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ftF8sXzoWk English will certainly outlast Chinese. The constitution of India is written in English and India will soon far eclipse China in terms of population. I think it's a given, is assumed by most people, and not overly worth arguing > But you're certainly mistaken that language recognition is sequential. The initial input and output of [spoken] language is sequential by definition and structure of the ear and voicebox. I simply meant that you can not speak two words or hear two words at the same time in the manner that you can see two words at the same time. You can see indentation in a text document\program, but you have to add extra syntax in spoken language to convey this. Internal language recognition\parsing is incredibly LISP like. I'll try to add a more detailed explanation of what I mean by this in the future when I have more time. [ basically when the human brain processes information, there are limited resources, right. The working memory buffer for the human brain can only hold 5-7 "chunks" at the same time. You have to resort to the phenomena of "chunking" to process more information. You should find this article very interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology) So basically we use "operators" to chunk things together. We could have a "phrase" operator that chunks a noun, verb, and object together. What's great or genius is that this "phrase", or function, is ALSO a chunk. and you can combine those chunks together in the same manner even if they are functions. This is like LISP: functions are data and data are functions. This is the "big deal" about LISP. It's similar to in the human brain, where everything is a "chunk". As long as you have processed sub-ideas into a chunk and have given a name for that chunk, you can start wielding bigger ideas. ] [ Spoken languages are all GOOD and reflective of human thought. Anyone is GOOD ENOUGH. The differences between spoken languages are small. The differences between LISP programming languages and non-LISP programming languages are vast. LISP is to thought as Python is to English. LISP is the most similar to an evolutionarily evolved structure (human thought). Therefore a LISP implementation could also share high survivability. And could survive longer than a human lifespan. ]

astrange 16y ago
> What's great or genius is that this "phrase", or function, is ALSO a chunk. and you can combine those chunks together in the same manner even if they are functions. This is like LISP: functions are data and data are functions. These two sentences have no apparent relation, except that you said they did. Spoken language sentences do not evaluate each other and none of them are apparently functions. Also, spoken languages don't have punctuation…
- silentbicycle 16y ago
  I think (s)he's saying that human languages have composable, tree-like structures. There's nothing Lisp-specific about that, though. Prolog would work just as well, or ML (human languages may be statically typed), Joy, etc. Also, I'm an amateur linguist at best, but the recursive structures in human languages generally don't get more than a couple levels deep - the linguistic stack seems to get smashed pretty easily.
  - metamemetics 16y ago
    > but the recursive structures in human languages generally don't get more than a couple levels deep - the linguistic stack seems to get smashed pretty easily. Sentences yes (figure 7 chunk limit), semantic associations tokened by words, no.
- metamemetics 16y ago
  > Spoken language sentences do not evaluate each other and none of them are apparently functions I tried to clarify the proper analogy at the end. LISP is not directly analogous to spoken language (the surface level), LISP is directly analogous to human thought (that interprets language internally). This was really the topic for an article and not a comment rant, sorry.
bad_user 16y ago
If I'm hungry I would say "Hey, give me a Hot Dog". I wouldn't be drawing diagrams of synapses and how the chemical signals flow when I'm thinking about that Hot Dog. The issue of language parsing and how Lisp-like it is, it's incredibly irrelevant.

loewenskind 16y ago

>There is no one language. There cannot be one. Especially when you consider that language isn't just spoken words. It's a whole way of thinking. A big part of the culture itself. That's not going to just die off because English speakers are too lazy to learn any other languages.