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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 wou

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.

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.