[HN Gopher] What makes a language flourish? Or: Why can't I spea...
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What makes a language flourish? Or: Why can't I speak Latin? (2021)
Author : tosh
Score : 39 points
Date : 2024-02-23 09:04 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.5jt.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.5jt.com)
| surprisetalk wrote:
| I've recently been enchanted by BQN, which "aims to remove
| irregular and burdensome aspects of the APL tradition, and put
| the great ideas on a firmer footing":
|
| [1] https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Oh, that translation ! Thanks for the laugh.
| tempodox wrote:
| Darn, I didn't read that translation because I didn't need it.
| But it's a nice pun on how anglophones pronounce Latin like it
| were English.
| k__ wrote:
| As far as I know, nobody is sure how it's pronounced
| correctly.
|
| I'm German and our teachers always said, Latin is easy to
| pronounce, just like you would do it in German, but that's
| just an educated guess.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| People have been teaching each other how to pronouncing
| Latin non-stop since Ancient Rome. So, while it's probable
| that there's some deviation, it's not a guess at all.
|
| Besides, most Latin languages agree on most of their
| sounds, so even if we didn't know how it sounds, that guess
| would be very highly educated.
| t-3 wrote:
| Linguists have analyzed ancient texts (through common
| misspellings, poetry, etc) and mostly pieced together what
| it sounded at like at certain times/places. Pronunciation
| is a moving target and not much worth getting hung up on.
| tosh wrote:
| "It is a privilege to learn a language/A journey into the
| immediate" -- Marilyn Hacker
| jmclnx wrote:
| To me it was the PC as he alluded to. But maybe for a different
| reason.
|
| When PCs came out, first we had Basic (free) then Pascal and c
| came along. All were cheap compared to other languages. I do not
| know about APL, but IIRC, FORTRAN and COBOL both cost over $1000,
| the others were either free or could be found for under $200.
|
| So, price won the day. I found Zortech c v1 (not c++) for $99 for
| my 286. That is where I ended up, and compared to Microsoft c I
| had at work later on, I thought it was just as good and in some
| cases better (disp_* libs).
|
| When I went to Linux, back then it was c/c++. For some reason at
| the time, to me it seemed GNU had issues with providing APL and
| COBOL. I think that was due to academic snobbery. Now we have GNU
| APL and COBOL, but too little to late.
| mlochbaum wrote:
| For what it's worth, GNU APL is GNU because the developer chose
| to associate their project with GNU, not because there was any
| sort of effort by GNU as an organization to implement APL (see
| also [0]). It implements what I think is a pretty outdated APL
| (e.g. dynamic scoping everywhere, no control structures for
| loops), and I'd say there are better free options now, like Kap
| and April, and some others listed at [1].
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_GNU_packages#What_it_m...
|
| [1] https://aplwiki.com/wiki/List_of_open-
| source_array_languages
| ghaff wrote:
| DeSmet C was another cheap mostly standard C early on. It was
| Borland that made Pascal cheap.
|
| I remember being intrigued by APL but, at the time, on PCs, I'm
| not sure there would have been any reasonable way to run it.
|
| Yes, in general, language tools were very expensive for PC
| hobbyists in the 80s.
| gumby wrote:
| This essay is (perhaps unwittingly) about something important to
| entrepreneur-nerds (the putative audience for HN), encapsulated
| in the quote from one Janet Lustgarten: Our
| customers are people for whom everything else has failed.
|
| A common trope here for the past few years is "your company
| doesn't love you". Well, your customers don't either.
|
| Sure, some products can attract a fan base for a while: Evernote.
| Apple. Certain car companies years ago (or even today). But that
| simply papers over the real issue which is that people don't
| really care about your product, much less you.
|
| I have been intrigued by the phrase "people 'hire your product'
| to get a job done." They want the hole in the wall, not the drill
| and bit. So they won't buy your product unless they have to.
|
| I so often see here (and trust me, I make this mistake all the
| time myself) of people posting about their product/demo/something
| cool they wrote and but really only talking about themselves.
| That only works with the last of those.
| al_borland wrote:
| One of the reasons I think Apple has been successful at
| launching new product categories, where those before them
| trying to launch the same category have floundered, is they
| really talk up the problem statement and what the product will
| do for the user. "1,000 songs in your pocket." As a consumer, I
| can understand this, I see the value to my life, and I don't
| have to care about what technology was needed to make it
| possible.
|
| Consistently solve problems for customers (even if the problem
| was made up) and the company will have fans... until they stop
| solving the consumer's problems.
| ghaff wrote:
| MP3 players were already a thing. I couldn't actually tell
| you at this point why I first bought an iPod (my first Apple
| purchase) with I think the 4th gen click wheel. Presumably it
| was at a technology point where I felt I should probably get
| one of these things and Apple seemed the best choice.
| hmry wrote:
| Well the popular story goes that mp3 players were a thing
| but either had very little flash storage, or had a big
| bulky hard drive and terrible battery life. Then iPod came
| out with a newly developed tiny hard drive, plus a flash
| buffer so it would only have to spin up the hd every 20
| minutes, plus a good control scheme plus a fast port for
| transferring files plus iTunes which was supposedly better
| than the competing software options. Though I can't
| personally verify all that, since I never had an early mp3
| player
| golergka wrote:
| I've had an iRiver h340 mp3 player with 40gb hard drive,
| not that different from what iPod offered. But when I got
| an iPod instead, it just felt so much better, even
| compared to the custom firmware like Rockbox. Same tech
| specs, but a vastly superior product -- a very common
| thing that I've seen repeated with many other Apple
| products, like a Nokia 6600 vs first iPhone just a couple
| of years later.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| People buy newer Apple products without any need, or perhaps
| even knowledge of the full feature set.
|
| It's part of their identity, and social display.
|
| I think you massively underestimate the power of and need for
| good marketing.
| dasil003 wrote:
| The problem to be solved need not be utilitarian, in this
| case it is status signaling. But note that this is only
| possible with long-game brand-building, and "good marketing"
| massively understates what does into achieving this kind of
| brand positioning. For instance, Apple never would have
| gotten here is they weren't absolutely obsessed with user
| experience from day one. The journey from capturing early
| adopters to mainstream status symbol is not really something
| that can be planned out, rather it is an emergent phenomenon
| flowing out of company values that savvy leadership can, at
| most, capitalize on, but never fully control.
| Retric wrote:
| I think tech people vastly overstate how much Apple devices
| are status symbols to the average consumer.
|
| Most non tech adults I know buy them as low effort ie just
| works devices. The perception isn't that they are great
| just that the other options are worse. It's a combination
| of useful defaults, reasonable UI, and few gotchas like a
| short lifespan or poor battery life. Most of them had
| multiple phones before the iPhone, but ran into various
| issues.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Agreed, but I'm just responding to the GPs point, not
| making a statistical argument about how many people see
| it as a status symbol (and what subset of those would
| publicly admit it).
| ghaff wrote:
| Eh. I buy a few Apple products and not many others. Ecosystem
| plays a role as well as, of course, my perception of the
| functionality of an individual product. I certainly don't
| have an auto-buy flag for new products as they come out and
| have never once ordered Day 1.
| tehnub wrote:
| Just because you buy an Apple product out of desire (perhaps
| without even knowing the full feature set) does not mean you
| are buying it for social display. That is one of numerous
| possible reasons.
| golergka wrote:
| If this was the main reason for people to purchase the phone,
| they would still be buying Nokia Vertu phones instead.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| Or because they just fucking work without us having to think
| or spend time on them getting them to do what we want. And
| no, I don't care about the "full feature set". I know it does
| what I need it to do without any hassle.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| That might be true for b2b, but totally wrong for consumer
| products. Have you never seen someone polish their car on a
| beautiful sunday, when they could be doing anything else?
|
| Consumers buy most things because they want to, not because
| they need to. They desperately want to love your product.
| Unfortunately most products don't deserve to be loved which a
| whole other matter.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| That saying is there because companies are unable to have
| emotions.
|
| But people are perfectly capable of having them. And while
| people don't love everything they do, they are perfectly
| capable of loving you, a product, a store, or anything at all.
|
| So, no, it only applies to your customers if they are
| companies.
| citrin_ru wrote:
| > They want the hole in the wall, not the drill and bit.
|
| Well, it depends. Some people enjoy using high quality tools
| and would drill an extra hole because they like the tool.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| "Landlords hate him!"
| robocat wrote:
| Software engineers and drills and holes in the wall:
| https://xkcd.com/2021/ https://xkcd.com/905/
| tempodox wrote:
| > We language champions are enchanted, enslaved by the beauty we
| found. But no one else cares.
|
| I feel this way for both natural languages and formal ones
| (programming languages, algebra). And I still find it hard to get
| used to the "no one else cares" part, no matter how well I know
| it to be true.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in
| the original Belter Creole.
|
| https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/bGOFEvpJHIK2ZjPj-5a2tQhTIw...
| GERETERUT: Da Ofiliya im ta du kuxaku sif! KELOWDIYUSH:
| Felota! Da Layeretesh gonya tenye redzherosh.
| hobs wrote:
| Your client does not have permission to get URL /bGOFEvpJHIK2
| ZjPj-5a2tQhTIwLAvzBuKm82jy6H3zjedM2FmJcPecdUqi8Osq68X3VlnZwhE
| d_DyOyDbx6B6ShCDEUp9ubt8Q2n2IIfYKysAueRxYTREZPBVUmK3uG0xQ=w12
| 80 from this server. (Client IP address: redacted)
| countWSS wrote:
| Elegant, complex and expressive languages aren't easy to
| read/debug/rewrite. Having a set of special symbols, arcane
| syntax and complex abstractions isn't a selling point: the
| purpose of the language to have maintainable and performant
| software - not to extend the language itself or showcase its
| strengths. Nobody would "switch to X"/"Rewrite in X", just
| because X is better, it has to be substantially better for the
| specific use-case: like a user would not start learning Lojban
| just because its much better than English, a specific use-case
| and pragmatic reasons would need to appear where Lojban-as-tool,
| not Lojban-as-elegant-expression, will clearly outperform English
| in its domain(e.g. translating concept to some precise neutral
| representation), and since these use-cases are quite rare, Lojban
| would not get as much audience despite its rich constructive
| capabilities in describing concepts.
| smokel wrote:
| I'm sure it's a combination of mass hysteria and flocking
| behaviour in humans.
|
| These find their origins in primitive survival techniques: there
| is safety in numbers, both for raising early alarms, and for
| protecting against stronger enemies.
|
| I've had great fun with Common Lisp, and I quite liked Scala and
| recently Kotlin, but professionally I have to make do with Java,
| TypeScript and Python.
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