3 ms·

It's funny. In one of my first just-out-of-college jobs I worked at a company where "the IT guys" were definitely not at the forefront of the company. However r

by bane 8y ago

It's funny. In one of my first just-out-of-college jobs I worked at a company where "the IT guys" were definitely not at the forefront of the company. However research staff were awarded bonuses or pay differentials if they knew a foreign language even a little bit. I argued, somewhat successfully, that the time and effort it takes to become "native" at a programming language was comparable to a human language...and even if it was say 30% as hard, everybody in the department knew 4 or 5 different languages pretty well and thus should be payed as if they had put the time into learning Spanish or French or whatnot. The point that made it really sync in was when we had a series of tasks show up on a contract that required people with programming ability and the research staff wasn't able to "pick it up in a few months" despite huge training efforts and the IT staff was pressed into service to perform on the contract. Some of the research work was in French and most of us knew enough about Romance languages that we could usually produce a reasonable gist of the document before going to the researchers for a proper translation. We also often just used babelfish to try to figure out what was being said. They ended up creating a technical and nontechnical staff tracks and migrated a number of the IT staff over into "Technical Researcher" roles. The difference was foreign language bonuses applied to the nontechnical staff and programming language proficiency resulted in a salary bump.

mikekchar 8y ago
Learning a human language is not "hard" in the way that rocket science is "hard". Almost anyone can learn a language and many of the least smart people in the world are adept in at least one human language. That might be obvious. We all speak at least one language because we learned it in childhood. What's less obvious is that learning a second language is not "harder" than learning a first language -- at least in the way that learning rocket science is "harder" than learning a card game. Language is not difficult. It's has evolved in the way that it has precisely because that's the way we think already. However, learning a human language is "hard" in that human languages are huge. Normal adult proficiency for a college graduate is over 20,000 word families. There are about 1500 common grammatical structures. The combination of idiomatic phrases for a fluent speaker is mind boggling. Learning a language is not complicated -- it's a grind. People fail to learn human languages not because they lack the ability to learn a language, but rather because they are unable or unwilling to simply put in the time and effort. It takes the average human child 12-18 years of full time study and practice to get to adult level proficiency and fluency in their first language. You can do it considerably faster for subsequent languages if you know how, but this is really the benchmark you should compare against. Computer languages, in comparison, are "harder" to understand, but are orders of magnitude smaller. We're not talking 30% as big here, we're talking 0.01% as big. I don't think the task is in any way comparable.

by bane 8y ago

mikekchar 8y ago

Learning a human language is not "hard" in the way that rocket science is "hard". Almost anyone can learn a language and many of the least smart people in the world are adept in at least one human language. That might be obvious. We all speak at least one language because we learned it in childhood. What's less obvious is that learning a second language is not "harder" than learning a first language -- at least in the way that learning rocket science is "harder" than learning a card game. Language is not difficult. It's has evolved in the way that it has precisely because that's the way we think already. However, learning a human language is "hard" in that human languages are huge. Normal adult proficiency for a college graduate is over 20,000 word families. There are about 1500 common grammatical structures. The combination of idiomatic phrases for a fluent speaker is mind boggling. Learning a language is not complicated -- it's a grind. People fail to learn human languages not because they lack the ability to learn a language, but rather because they are unable or unwilling to simply put in the time and effort. It takes the average human child 12-18 years of full time study and practice to get to adult level proficiency and fluency in their first language. You can do it considerably faster for subsequent languages if you know how, but this is really the benchmark you should compare against. Computer languages, in comparison, are "harder" to understand, but are orders of magnitude smaller. We're not talking 30% as big here, we're talking 0.01% as big. I don't think the task is in any way comparable.