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> Funny you should use that as an example because one of my lockdown projects has been to learn to read simplified Chinese and I'd say your point about Latin-al

> Funny you should use that as an example because one of my lockdown projects has been to learn to read simplified Chinese and I'd say your point about Latin-alphabet languages was also true despite it being intended as a falsehood. but that's because you come from a latin background. I lived with a japanese girl for a long time and she was adamant that kanji were much easier and faster to parse for her than western text

hnlmorg 6y ago
> but that's because you come from a latin background. I lived with a japanese girl for a long time and she was adamant that kanji were much easier and faster to parse for her than western text You could make your same argument here and say "that's because she comes from a Japanese background" ;)
- jcelerier 6y ago
  but that is precisely my original argument. in the end everyone finds "simple" what they're accustomed to, and you end up with more-or-less the same amount of complexity overall, no matter the system used to express logical thoughts, if you let humans try to optimize it over decades (but systematically, for programming languages) or generations (but less systematically, for spoken languages). I'm mostly programming in C++ and I find understanding what happens in some Python scripts much harder than some template metaprograms I've worked on for instance.
  - hnlmorg 6y ago
    You're conflating different things now: simplicity vs familiarity. If someone is already a C++ guru then writing something in C++ for them will be easier than learning Go. But that doesn't mean that Go is easier to learn than C++. When talking about simplicity people generally compare all languages as if one has little or no familiarity with them. Otherwise it's not a fair comparison.
    - jcelerier 6y ago
      > You're conflating different things now: simplicity vs familiarity. we're talking about humans, you cannot not conflate them. > When talking about simplicity people generally compare all languages as if one has little or no familiarity with them. that's a philosophically pointless exercice. Things have to be assessed in their actual, real-world context to bear any relevance !
      - hnlmorg 6y ago
        ...and you asses something by comparison. Having different starting points isn't a comparison, it's a bias. I don't have an issue with people having a bias (we all have our own preferences, our own strengths and weaknesses, and stuff we just enjoy more than other stuff). But lets not pretend it's anything more than a bias if you're not willing to compare things from an even starting point.
  - flippinburgers 6y ago
    All you need to do is look at how many, many more hours Japanese students have to put into studying kanji to know that your perspective isn't accurate. The basics of learning Japanese are much more difficult that a latin language. What is more, the complexity means that people are very prone to forget how to even write kanji. To the degree that is is often a game show topic.
blacksmith_tb 6y ago
I took a year of Mandarin as an undergrad, and learned ~1,500 characters (at my best). The two approaches are just radically different (pun intended), with an alphabetic writing system (not just Latin, but Arabic, Cyrillic, etc.) if you know the system, you can read texts in other languages that share that system aloud - without knowing what you're saying. With logographic systems like Hanzi, you may be able to guess at the meaning of a character you don't know by looking at its radical, but you have no idea how to pronounce it. I do think broadly speaking alphabets are easier to teach and to learn, though still not easy (ask any small child).
turtlebits 6y ago
Part of the hard part in learning Chinese and Japanese is that there is a separate phoenetic "alphabet" you have to learn to properly pronounce characters. (at least in Taiwan, kids learn bopofomo)
- fomine3 6y ago
  Native Japanese never learn alphabets for pronounce.
alisonatwork 6y ago
I can see some kind of argument that logograms are easier to parse than an alphabet because you can communicate more information in a smaller space, but that's only true if you already committed the thousands (!) of logograms to memory in the first place. This is no trivial task! The question is if it's worth putting a 5+ year barrier in front of people in order to become fluent in a written language that maybe, possibly, might be "faster" once you are fluent. For native speakers, perhaps that's worth the effort (although there are plenty who argue otherwise). For second-language speakers, I think the answer is almost certainly no. So bringing it back to Go. Perhaps Go seems more difficult and slow to people who already invested the years required to become fluent with something like C++. I doubt that, but I guess it's possible. But Go isn't designed for that case. It's designed as a second language that any programmer can learn quickly and become reasonably productive in. If you have a company with 1000 programmers who all know different languages, and you want to start creating good software right now, would you standardize on the language that all 1000 programmers can learn in a couple of weeks, or the language that 100 programmers know inside out and the other 900 are going to spend a year figuring out?

hnlmorg 6y ago

> but that's because you come from a latin background. I lived with a japanese girl for a long time and she was adamant that kanji were much easier and faster to parse for her than western text You could make your same argument here and say "that's because she comes from a Japanese background" ;)

jcelerier 6y ago
but that is precisely my original argument. in the end everyone finds "simple" what they're accustomed to, and you end up with more-or-less the same amount of complexity overall, no matter the system used to express logical thoughts, if you let humans try to optimize it over decades (but systematically, for programming languages) or generations (but less systematically, for spoken languages). I'm mostly programming in C++ and I find understanding what happens in some Python scripts much harder than some template metaprograms I've worked on for instance.
- hnlmorg 6y ago
  You're conflating different things now: simplicity vs familiarity. If someone is already a C++ guru then writing something in C++ for them will be easier than learning Go. But that doesn't mean that Go is easier to learn than C++. When talking about simplicity people generally compare all languages as if one has little or no familiarity with them. Otherwise it's not a fair comparison.
  - jcelerier 6y ago
    > You're conflating different things now: simplicity vs familiarity. we're talking about humans, you cannot not conflate them. > When talking about simplicity people generally compare all languages as if one has little or no familiarity with them. that's a philosophically pointless exercice. Things have to be assessed in their actual, real-world context to bear any relevance !
    - hnlmorg 6y ago
      ...and you asses something by comparison. Having different starting points isn't a comparison, it's a bias. I don't have an issue with people having a bias (we all have our own preferences, our own strengths and weaknesses, and stuff we just enjoy more than other stuff). But lets not pretend it's anything more than a bias if you're not willing to compare things from an even starting point.
- flippinburgers 6y ago
  All you need to do is look at how many, many more hours Japanese students have to put into studying kanji to know that your perspective isn't accurate. The basics of learning Japanese are much more difficult that a latin language. What is more, the complexity means that people are very prone to forget how to even write kanji. To the degree that is is often a game show topic.

blacksmith_tb 6y ago

I took a year of Mandarin as an undergrad, and learned ~1,500 characters (at my best). The two approaches are just radically different (pun intended), with an alphabetic writing system (not just Latin, but Arabic, Cyrillic, etc.) if you know the system, you can read texts in other languages that share that system aloud - without knowing what you're saying. With logographic systems like Hanzi, you may be able to guess at the meaning of a character you don't know by looking at its radical, but you have no idea how to pronounce it. I do think broadly speaking alphabets are easier to teach and to learn, though still not easy (ask any small child).

turtlebits 6y ago

Part of the hard part in learning Chinese and Japanese is that there is a separate phoenetic "alphabet" you have to learn to properly pronounce characters. (at least in Taiwan, kids learn bopofomo)

fomine3 6y ago
Native Japanese never learn alphabets for pronounce.

alisonatwork 6y ago

I can see some kind of argument that logograms are easier to parse than an alphabet because you can communicate more information in a smaller space, but that's only true if you already committed the thousands (!) of logograms to memory in the first place. This is no trivial task! The question is if it's worth putting a 5+ year barrier in front of people in order to become fluent in a written language that maybe, possibly, might be "faster" once you are fluent. For native speakers, perhaps that's worth the effort (although there are plenty who argue otherwise). For second-language speakers, I think the answer is almost certainly no. So bringing it back to Go. Perhaps Go seems more difficult and slow to people who already invested the years required to become fluent with something like C++. I doubt that, but I guess it's possible. But Go isn't designed for that case. It's designed as a second language that any programmer can learn quickly and become reasonably productive in. If you have a company with 1000 programmers who all know different languages, and you want to start creating good software right now, would you standardize on the language that all 1000 programmers can learn in a couple of weeks, or the language that 100 programmers know inside out and the other 900 are going to spend a year figuring out?