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Anna Lear
Anna Lear
02:19
@DavidThielen Sounds fun. I hope it goes well. :)
@JeremyHeiler The beauty of this chat is that it doesn't really matter how much time passes.
lazyPower
lazyPower
haha, yeah. We all drift away into our IDE/Editors or that thing people refer to as 'life' and come back days later to catch up on the blurbs
user20683
03:01
It's mildly frightening that I've spent enough time on the site to almost be able to tell where a user is front just by how they phrase questions.
user20683
*from
user20683
The bad grammar is infecting me. I shall go detox and be back later
user20683
@AnnaLear Thanks for the further clean up of that question.
Anna Lear
Anna Lear
@WorldEngineer No problem. I agree with your observation, too. There are some interesting linguistic patterns that emerge.
Makes me want to learn more languages.
user20683
@AnnaLear I spoke Swabian German as a second language as a child and I know some Spanish. I need to learn High German at some point down the line and probably something hard like Chinese or Finnish. I've had a lot of Chinese and Indian peers and instructors so I tend to be decent at deciphering those patterns and sympathetic enough to their situation linguistically to try and fix it.
user20683
03:13
Being a hobby linguist doesn't hurt.
Anna Lear
Anna Lear
@WorldEngineer I got Russian and English (as a second language) down with bits of French and German thrown in for fun.
I keep toying with the idea of learning something else, but I can never settle on what. The time commitment needed to actually do it justice is also a problem. :)
user20683
@AnnaLear I've considered Russian; mostly for the ability to read mathematics at the cutting edge. I also like Tolstoy a whole lot; so being able to read the original would be nice. German is on the list for that reason as well, French too. I hear tale that the conjugation is positively Byzantine though.
Anna Lear
Anna Lear
@WorldEngineer In Russian? Yeah, it can get pretty tricky. There are rules for it, for the most part, but it'd probably take a fair bit of memorization and practice to get used to them.
user20683
@AnnaLear I'd reckon English is much the same. Homophones galore; Bizarre and idiosyncratic spelling rules; Obvious loanwords to a level where it's mildly embarrassing. Odd syntax constructs like "How do you do?", borrowed from Welsh of all places. Daniel Webster caused further problems by canonizing a substantially different set of spellings for American English than Commonwealth (Proper) English. It just kind of marches on.
Anna Lear
Anna Lear
03:28
I don't recall having a lot of problems with English in that sense, but to be fair, I didn't really think about it at the time on account of being 8. It does get tricky after the basics, though. So many exceptions, so little time. :)
user20683
The relevant question though, is what programming language maps to what real one?
user20683
I'd argue APL for Chinese
user20683
Python is Indonesian where pluralizing is simply repeating a word
user20683
Man = Orang, Men = Orang Orang
user20683
very very straightforward I'm told
Anna Lear
Anna Lear
03:33
American English and British English have to be like Java and C# - ostensibly similar but with differences once you dig deeper.
user20683
which makes German C++
user20683
powerful, precise, used incorrectly so often it's not noticed except by the beards
Anna Lear
Anna Lear
Or Ruby? German sounds a lot like a metaprogramming kinda language... Don't know the word for something? No problem! Stick a few related words you do know together and compose the word you want.
user20683
I think this will lead in circles eventually
user20683
Still at least programming gets you somewhere, in the humanities everything gets clouded by post-modernist nonsense
user20683
03:36
my Embedded Systems instructor had no idea what the term meant as a native English speaker
Anna Lear
Anna Lear
@WorldEngineer I dunno about that. Have you seen some of the more argumentative questions on P.SE? ;)
user20683
@AnnaLear Yes, I flag them so that you, Chris or Mark can stake them through the heart by attaching a "final" keyword, decreasing the reference count to 0 and pressing "Compile".
thorsten müller
thorsten müller
15:20
Interesting thoughts on the German language. As a German I would drop in LISP to compare it with, for all the complicated things you can do with how it's structuring sentences. Mark Twain had a few insights in The Awful German Language. Otherwise C++ is the better match I think, for the overly complicated grammar. Ruby is just too nice and cute to compare well. C++ and German have both something very Gothic about them.
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