5 ms·

Welsh Wikipedia gives me hope

16 points by lelf 7y ago

inflatableDodo 7y ago
In one of Grace Hopper's lectures she mentions that she intially made a multilingual programming language, but this upset the people she showed it to, as it would make it easier to use for people who didn't speak English, so that feature was removed. I have thought ever since, that this descision is something that has fundamentally affected the culture of software development in a number of profoundly negative ways.
- emmelaich 7y ago
  Hmm, that sounds like one of those anecdotes that is retold for more drama than fact. So I looked it up. I found this which merely sounds like a managers sensible YAGNI decision. > Management was concerned that Hopper’s plans were too ambitious, and that the Automatic Programming Department was wasting time and energy exploring such marginal areas as multilingual programming. “It was completely self-evident [to management] that an American computer built in blue-belt Pennsylvania couldn’t possibly be programmed in French or German,” she recalled. Hopper had to assure her superiors that the proposed business language would only be in English. https://epdf.pub/grace-hopper-and-the-invention-of-the-information-age-lemelson-center-studies-in.html https://epdf.pub/grace-hopper-and-the-invention-of-the-infor...
  - inflatableDodo 7y ago
    >Management was concerned that Hopper’s plans were too ambitious, and that the Automatic Programming Department was wasting time and energy exploring such marginal areas as multilingual programming. This is not at all the impression given by Grace. Also, I'll note this explanation makes no logical sense given that it was the first demo to management of something that management had already told Grace she wouldn't be able to do at all. If they were concerned at the waste of time and energy, they would presumably have stopped her when they believed that what she was working on was never going to work, rather than requesting the removal of a feature that had been implemented in the first demo. Here is Grace's take on it, from her MIT lecture - 'We'd like to run this German program for you...' Have you figured out what happened to us? That thing hit the fan. It was absolutely obvious, that a respectable American computer, built in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, could not understand French or German. And I had to spend the next four months saying no, no, no, no, no, no! We wouldn't think of programming it in anything but English. She starts the topic at around 59 minutes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR0ujwlvbkQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR0ujwlvbkQ edit - I just checked the dates. Never mind logical sense, the explanation fails chronological sense. Her demo was in 1952 and she became the very first director of Eckert–Mauchly's newly formed Department of Automatic Programming, sometime in 1954. They definitely were not worried about time and energy being wasted in a department that wouldn't even exist for another two years.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  COM supports multilingual components. Nobody uses it because having different names for the same things makes it harder for humans to reason about the subsequent code.
  - inflatableDodo 7y ago
    After searching for documentation on this feature of COM, I have another theory as to why people do not use it. And it is very similar to the reason why Arthur Dent found it surprising that his house was being knocked down to make way for a bypass.
- ghda 7y ago
  I think it’s legitimate for Welsh speakers to advocate for the Welsh language, just as I think it’s legitimate for English speakers to advocate for the English language. As a native English speaker, I don’t want to make it easy for the world to speak languages other than English either.
Igelau 7y ago
Scots Wikipedia is the best Wikipedia. https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yird https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yird
- linux2647 7y ago
  Is this what it’s like to read Dutch as someone who speaks German? Or Flemish as someone who speaks Dutch?
Zanni 7y ago
Oh, for fuck's sake. Alexa not speaking Welsh is hardly a "horror story." Alexa doesn't speak your language? Don't buy it. It's not "[telling] you which language your family can speak at home," it's offering a service to the fattest part of the market first. The revival of Welsh (and Welsh Wikipedia) is a wonderful thing, but the framing of the article is awful. For what it's worth, I live in Hawaii, where the native language and culture (and government) were also brutally suppressed. Currently there are less than 10,000 native speakers of the Hawaiian language. There's been an uptick with the recent creation of Hawaiian-language immersion schools, though. You know what Wikipedia doesn't have? A Hawaiian version, even though it's named for a Hawaiian (wiki) word.
- bawolff 7y ago
  Wikipedia does have that https://haw.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ka_papa_kinohi https://haw.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ka_papa_kinohi
  - Zanni 7y ago
    Wow, thank you, I had no idea. It doesn't appear in the language dropdown list, so I assumed it didn't exist.
  - GuB-42 7y ago
    And Google translate properly detects and translates the language too. Well despite the first sentence "He puke documents and Wikipedia", the translation seems consistent.
    - Zanni 7y ago
      Interesting. The first sentence seems to translate correctly for me: "Wikipedia is an independent research journal."
- _nalply 7y ago
  Please don't belittle minority languages or societies. While your observation might be suitable, the language is not. People who define themselves as a member of a minority group tend to be sensitive. Their group might have experienced gruesome oppression. They tend to be hurt quickly. So you need to be careful in expressing your opinion, especially if you view yourself as the member of one of the majority groups.
Myrmornis 7y ago
Bear with me -- I often wonder whether, for subjects which transcend cultural differences, Wikipedia should only allow non-English pages where English-native pages do not exist. My reason is that I suspect that the English-native versions of pages will tend to be the highest quality due to editor volume/attention, etc, and I do not want non-English speaking communities to be disadvantaged by lower quality Wikipedia content. So, the suggestion would be intense focus on automatic translation of English pages, rather than creation of parallel pages in n languages.
- _nalply 7y ago
  I am afraid there's a deal breaker to this interesting idea. Some languages are in some areas a lot more expressive than English. (Beware of the Blub paradoxon where in programming languages someone doesn't understand concepts not present in the programming language he uses: for natural languages this means that speaker of one language might have some difficulty to grasp the expressiveness of another language.) This means if there is a language which could describe something more easily than English then you shouldn't deny the possibility of a non-English page.
  - Myrmornis 7y ago
    Sure. Fairly rare though? I think English will be as adequate as any natural language to describe most core phenomena of our physical universe and human culture.
    - _nalply 7y ago
      Signed Languages of the Deaf are more expressive describing form, motion and dynamics in the 3D-space and also subtle differences in emotion than English and German. Bernese German also seems to be more expressive expressing emotions related to the body, working and being at ease compared to High German. These are the examples I have encountered myself so I don't believe this to be really rare. There's a thing where English really excels. It has a gigantic lexicon with many words differing in subtle aspects, so you can be very precise. This also makes it easy to create puns.

16 points by lelf 7y ago

In one of Grace Hopper's lectures she mentions that she intially made a multilingual programming language, but this upset the people she showed it to, as it would make it easier to use for people who didn't speak English, so that feature was removed. I have thought ever since, that this descision is something that has fundamentally affected the culture of software development in a number of profoundly negative ways.

emmelaich 7y ago
Hmm, that sounds like one of those anecdotes that is retold for more drama than fact. So I looked it up. I found this which merely sounds like a managers sensible YAGNI decision. > Management was concerned that Hopper’s plans were too ambitious, and that the Automatic Programming Department was wasting time and energy exploring such marginal areas as multilingual programming. “It was completely self-evident [to management] that an American computer built in blue-belt Pennsylvania couldn’t possibly be programmed in French or German,” she recalled. Hopper had to assure her superiors that the proposed business language would only be in English. https://epdf.pub/grace-hopper-and-the-invention-of-the-information-age-lemelson-center-studies-in.html https://epdf.pub/grace-hopper-and-the-invention-of-the-infor...
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  >Management was concerned that Hopper’s plans were too ambitious, and that the Automatic Programming Department was wasting time and energy exploring such marginal areas as multilingual programming. This is not at all the impression given by Grace. Also, I'll note this explanation makes no logical sense given that it was the first demo to management of something that management had already told Grace she wouldn't be able to do at all. If they were concerned at the waste of time and energy, they would presumably have stopped her when they believed that what she was working on was never going to work, rather than requesting the removal of a feature that had been implemented in the first demo. Here is Grace's take on it, from her MIT lecture - 'We'd like to run this German program for you...' Have you figured out what happened to us? That thing hit the fan. It was absolutely obvious, that a respectable American computer, built in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, could not understand French or German. And I had to spend the next four months saying no, no, no, no, no, no! We wouldn't think of programming it in anything but English. She starts the topic at around 59 minutes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR0ujwlvbkQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR0ujwlvbkQ edit - I just checked the dates. Never mind logical sense, the explanation fails chronological sense. Her demo was in 1952 and she became the very first director of Eckert–Mauchly's newly formed Department of Automatic Programming, sometime in 1954. They definitely were not worried about time and energy being wasted in a department that wouldn't even exist for another two years.
kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
COM supports multilingual components. Nobody uses it because having different names for the same things makes it harder for humans to reason about the subsequent code.
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  After searching for documentation on this feature of COM, I have another theory as to why people do not use it. And it is very similar to the reason why Arthur Dent found it surprising that his house was being knocked down to make way for a bypass.
ghda 7y ago
I think it’s legitimate for Welsh speakers to advocate for the Welsh language, just as I think it’s legitimate for English speakers to advocate for the English language. As a native English speaker, I don’t want to make it easy for the world to speak languages other than English either.

Igelau 7y ago

Scots Wikipedia is the best Wikipedia. https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yird https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yird

linux2647 7y ago
Is this what it’s like to read Dutch as someone who speaks German? Or Flemish as someone who speaks Dutch?

Zanni 7y ago

Oh, for fuck's sake. Alexa not speaking Welsh is hardly a "horror story." Alexa doesn't speak your language? Don't buy it. It's not "[telling] you which language your family can speak at home," it's offering a service to the fattest part of the market first. The revival of Welsh (and Welsh Wikipedia) is a wonderful thing, but the framing of the article is awful. For what it's worth, I live in Hawaii, where the native language and culture (and government) were also brutally suppressed. Currently there are less than 10,000 native speakers of the Hawaiian language. There's been an uptick with the recent creation of Hawaiian-language immersion schools, though. You know what Wikipedia doesn't have? A Hawaiian version, even though it's named for a Hawaiian (wiki) word.

bawolff 7y ago
Wikipedia does have that https://haw.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ka_papa_kinohi https://haw.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ka_papa_kinohi
- Zanni 7y ago
  Wow, thank you, I had no idea. It doesn't appear in the language dropdown list, so I assumed it didn't exist.
- GuB-42 7y ago
  And Google translate properly detects and translates the language too. Well despite the first sentence "He puke documents and Wikipedia", the translation seems consistent.
  - Zanni 7y ago
    Interesting. The first sentence seems to translate correctly for me: "Wikipedia is an independent research journal."
_nalply 7y ago
Please don't belittle minority languages or societies. While your observation might be suitable, the language is not. People who define themselves as a member of a minority group tend to be sensitive. Their group might have experienced gruesome oppression. They tend to be hurt quickly. So you need to be careful in expressing your opinion, especially if you view yourself as the member of one of the majority groups.

Myrmornis 7y ago

Bear with me -- I often wonder whether, for subjects which transcend cultural differences, Wikipedia should only allow non-English pages where English-native pages do not exist. My reason is that I suspect that the English-native versions of pages will tend to be the highest quality due to editor volume/attention, etc, and I do not want non-English speaking communities to be disadvantaged by lower quality Wikipedia content. So, the suggestion would be intense focus on automatic translation of English pages, rather than creation of parallel pages in n languages.

_nalply 7y ago
I am afraid there's a deal breaker to this interesting idea. Some languages are in some areas a lot more expressive than English. (Beware of the Blub paradoxon where in programming languages someone doesn't understand concepts not present in the programming language he uses: for natural languages this means that speaker of one language might have some difficulty to grasp the expressiveness of another language.) This means if there is a language which could describe something more easily than English then you shouldn't deny the possibility of a non-English page.
- Myrmornis 7y ago
  Sure. Fairly rare though? I think English will be as adequate as any natural language to describe most core phenomena of our physical universe and human culture.
  - _nalply 7y ago
    Signed Languages of the Deaf are more expressive describing form, motion and dynamics in the 3D-space and also subtle differences in emotion than English and German. Bernese German also seems to be more expressive expressing emotions related to the body, working and being at ease compared to High German. These are the examples I have encountered myself so I don't believe this to be really rare. There's a thing where English really excels. It has a gigantic lexicon with many words differing in subtle aspects, so you can be very precise. This also makes it easy to create puns.