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>The gist is that English single-digit numbers take longer to say/think than mandarin That has nothing to say, compare it to programming languages, is the lang

• bobbyz 6y ago
  You're thinking about it from purely a programmer's perspective. Imagine the world switches to "bobish" tomorrow, which is 20% more efficient than english. Suddenly, bandwidth decreases by 20%, downloads are 20% faster, server costs decrease 20%, data centre energy usage decreases by 20%, greenhouse gases from data centres decrease by 20%, and so global warming slows down by _% and on and on. Sure it won't be 20%, it might not be nearly that in many cases, but think about the magnitude of the rube goldberg of unknown efficiency increases you'll set off.
  • nix23 6y ago
    >You're thinking about it from purely a programmer's perspective >Suddenly, bandwidth decreases by 20%, downloads are 20% faster Who is thinking from a programmer perspective now? Compression is not always a good thing, and for sure not in natural language.
    • bobbyz 6y ago
      Why is compression bad in natural language? From reading those vitamin water labels it's clear to me that English still has room to shrink before we experience a substantial hit to readability. 'You' to 'u', 'what' to 'wat', 'phone' to 'fone', etc.