English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

but we have a limited amount of neurons, so we can't learn an unlimited number of patterns, so the most simple the langage is, the most room you have for the rest :) (I know it's over simplistic)

tchrist

It really is one of the easier things, honest.

You have many languages where gender is not masculine/feminine, but rather common/neuter or animate/inanimate.

English actually works that way, but only for pronouns.

And not consistently.

One cannot use it to refer to a human being in English, not even if you don’t know their gender or if they have been sterilized or if they are a genuine hermaphrodite, because it is not used for people.

Consider things like Czech or Polish, which have four or five genders.

n11

(conversely what's annoying is people using he/she for pets)

tchrist

“Annoying”? It is insulting not to do so.

n11

@tchrist ow, right

tchrist

7:15 PM

They are animates.

n11

not more than a wild animal, which is often 'smarter'

Matt Эллен

@tchrist except for babies

tchrist

Like how Polish has masculine animate, masculine inanimate, masculine personal, feminine, neuter genders.

Matt Эллен

or when it's really the dummy it

tchrist

@n11 That doesn’t matter. It’s not a matter of domesticity. A vixen builds a den for her kits, a mother bird sits on her eggs while her mate brings food.

@MattЭллен On occasion.

Matt Эллен

7:17 PM

"Who's at the door?"
"It's Matt"

n11

@tchrist oh ok I was unsure

'the spider take care of her eggs' ?

tchrist

A bull moose can be a mean creature, stopping you to death with his hooves or ramming you with his antlers.

@n11 Her is singular, spiders plural.

n11

corrected

tchrist

A mother spider certainly does.

She lays them carefully.

So for us, it’s an animacy marker, one that works for animals not plants or fungi.

Johan Larsson

I have a dumb idea, make all state private set and set it using reflection. That would prevent people from mutating all over the place.

tchrist

7:20 PM

So a female flower has to be an it not a she, because it lacks animacy.

@JohanLarsson I don’t know about your reflective bits, but any sound abstraction requires a functional (method) interface to inspect or alter its state.

You never expose the implementation.

Or should never.

You’ll hate yourself later if you don’t.

Johan Larsson

But I want to idiot proof things

tchrist

Yes, exactly.

That’s the right attitude. Honest.

Johan Larsson

problem is that I am the only member of this project who sees mutating all over the place as an issue

tchrist

But I don’t quite know what you are meaning.

Johan Larsson

Making things readonly so that it will require a hack to mutate

tchrist

7:23 PM

Just make all per-instance data —“variables/members/properties” — private.

Oh, that’s a bit different.

Johan Larsson

Doing it intentionally to make it too hard for the mindless mutators

tchrist

It’s better not to let them see it at all.

Use n = fred.age() not n = fred.age, right?

Or get_age or whatever.

Johan Larsson

I have no way to protect the code, stated a rule that making things public set is a big deal and it must be a decision before doing it.

No one cared about that.

tchrist

Um, so you have an existing code base that includes public data members for historical reasons?

Johan Larsson

public abstract class HistoryPoint
{
    protected HistoryPoint(DateTime timeStamp)
    {
        TimeStamp = timeStamp;
    }
    public DateTime TimeStamp { get; private set; }
}

tchrist

7:26 PM

That was unfortunate.

Johan Larsson

the private set is the C# way to do it, adding readonly makes it stronger

tchrist

I never let anything be anything but private.

Johan Larsson

@tchrist No it is a new project, been working on it for two months

tchrist

Well, for data members.

For functional elements, it depends.

Johan Larsson

Exposing read is no biggie imo

write is biggie

tchrist

7:27 PM

No, exposing read is bad because it locks you into the implementation.

There’s no mediated arm’s length abstraction.

Johan Larsson

ok I get your point but this is not library stuff

standalone app

tchrist

So if you refactor, the world breaks.

Oh.

Ok, then what is your concern again? If it’s a monolithic program instead of some shared classes, what are you trying to do? Is it code you alone work on, or are there others whom you don’t trust to behave?

Johan Larsson

the latter

tchrist

I see.

Johan Larsson

you don't have to outsource...

tchrist

7:31 PM

I don’t know. It’s hard to talk about these things without concrete examples and concerns, because specific situations can call for different approaches.

Johan Larsson

yaeh

was just a rant

tchrist

I wish that were all I have to worry about when other team-members diddle code.

Johan Larsson

I wish I could code with devs who were better than I am so I could learn.

I'm not even good.

tchrist

I cannot seem to get them to actually check their assumptions (arguments, input data, success/failure), whereas I pepper my code with asserts at the start of every function, and often throughout.

They always assume things will work.

Like if we are supposed to get a plain text file with say 6 fields per line, they never check that, and so blow up on lines with only 2 fields.

Yes, the provider violated the contract/API, but that is no excuse for the whole application planting a two-gigabyte core dump all because nobody checked the return count from split, and so ended up oversubscripting something.

Johan Larsson

also fail fast is nice

tchrist

7:38 PM

That sort of thing. It’s “Pollyanna Programming”, and it is a dangerous delusion.

Johan Larsson

fail fast -> find bug fast

tchrist

Yes.

But instead they just pass through stuff without validating it, and so 7 processing-chain steps down the line and 3 machines over, something blows up, and tracing it back to the original that failed to validate its assumptions is a royal pain in the ass.

You might know Pollyanna.

It comes from a book, but it means persistently optimistic even in the face of disaster.

Pollyannaish, but that’s ugly.

Johan Larsson

nope, never heard of it. Which book?

tchrist

Pollyanna /ˌpɒlɪˈænə/. Also Polyanna and with lower-case initial. The name of the heroine of stories written by Eleanor Hodgman Porter (1868-1920), American children’s author, used with allusion to her skill at the ‘glad game’ of finding cause for happiness in the most disastrous situations; one who is unduly optimistic or achieves happiness through self-delusion. Also attrib., Comb., and as adj.

1913 E. H. Porter Pollyanna xv. 148 - ‘Her name is Pollyanna Whittier.’.. ‘And what are the special ingredients of this wonder-working-tonic of hers?’.. ‘As near as I can find out it is an overwhe…

I recently discovered that 10 of our production applications which fork of children to do subtasks neglect to check that the child completes successfully. It can even dump core, and this goes unreported. Very frustrating.

Robusto

@tchrist I was talking about languages in general.

tchrist

7:46 PM

@Robusto It’s harder when you know more than one language with noun genders, because the genders can be very different in each, even with exact cognates.

Robusto

@tchrist Agreed.

tchrist

A French fenêtre and an Italian finiestra are both feminine, but a German Fenster is neuter.

But you only confuse them when you’re first learning, because you hear them repeated so often the right way.

Robusto

One of the things I actually liked about Russian was that (at least at my level) all the gender markers seemed to be very regular, so that it was obvious what gender a noun was just by looking at it. @RegDwigнt will probably contradict me, but that was my experience in the short time I studied it.

German has some clues: -ung, -heit, -keit will all be feminine, while -chen and -lein (diminutives) are neuter, usw.

tchrist

Even in the Germanic and Romance languages, there do exist patterns that have no exceptions, so once you learn the gender of a word with a certain ending, you can always know a new one’s gender.

Yes, that’s what I was referring to.

Like how all the Romance words that end in their cognate for our -tion ending are always feminine.

Things like that.

Robusto

That's one reason why Japanese wasn't as hard in some ways. No cases, no genders.

tchrist

7:52 PM

I don’t know how frequent productive suffixes like -chen are in German, like -ette in French, etc.

Some languages have a lot more of those.

And I am not counting agglutinative languages, either.

Robusto

Also, much of the time words ending in -e are feminine. But if you follow that too closely you run afoul of adjectival nouns, like der Junge.

tchrist

Ick.

177 French suffixes

But those are not all productive.

Only a few are.

But you could make new words modelled off of existing ones with those.

86 German suffixes

210 Spanish suffixes

The thing is, Spanish is the most productive of any of these for adding “affective” suffixes to their nouns, like -ito as a diminutive/affectionate or -ón for an an augmentative/pejorative.

There are also diminutives that are pejorative instead of affectionate, or suffixes that are purely pejorative.

Robusto

What is the literal translation of cabrón?

tchrist

It’s a pejorative augmentative to cabra, goat.

Robusto

Ah. Interesting.

tchrist

8:01 PM

Like bastard or asshole or dirty old man.

> Los diminutivos son lo siguiente:

-ito -cito -ecito -ececito (tontito, florecita)
-illo -cillo -ecillo -ececillo (panecillo)
-ico -cico -ecico -ececico
-uelo -zuelo -zuelo -ecezuelo (pañuelo)
-ete -cete -ecete (avioneta)
-ín (la espadín)
-iño

Augmentativos (make bigger)
-ón (rico-ricachon)
-azo (leche-lechazo)
-ote (gringo-gringote)
-udo

Pejorativos (make seem worse condition)
-aco (pájaro-pajarraco=sinister bird)
-arraco
-acho (pueblo-pueblacho=dead-end town)
-ajo (latin-latinajo=dog latin)

Except sometimes -uelo might not be so nice. Depends.

Robusto

@tchrist Abuelo is nice.

tchrist

Yes, but one doesn’t think of that as having a suffix.

Robusto

Mm.

tchrist

Rather, abuelito and abuelita are the ones with the suffixes, and mean nice/little grandpa/ma.

Abuelita is always positive affect.

There was a vulgar Latin aviolus that had a Latin diminutive on it. Portuguese just has avó and avô as their base forms.

Maybe. -ulus is a diminutive in Latin. Not sure of -olus.

The reason aviolus > aviolo > abolo > abuelo is because stressed vowels often stem changed, so o > ue and e > ie. Think of bene versus bien.

Robusto

There's one. -ula is both femine and plural, no?

tchrist

8:07 PM

French does this too.

@Robusto Well. Depends.

It depends on whether it started as a 1st declension, so -a is singular and -ae is plural/genitive, or if it started as a 2nd declension -um singular going to -a plural.

In Spanish, -ula is only fem singular.

But Latin speculum would have specula plural, yes.

This is why the Italian is messed up.

Because ovum/ova confused them.

Due to the collision of neuter plural and feminine singular, and then them losing the neuter gender altogether.

Robusto

It's a mess. I hated Latin, both for itself and its association with Catholicism.

tchrist

Lots of verbs stem-change in Romance, and abuelo is the same sort of thing. French venir > tu viens, or Spanish venir > tu vienes or Spanish morir > tu mueres.

Robusto

But studying it helped me improve my English vocabulary.

tchrist

Yes, although not with words anybody else will know what means. :)

I’m handicapped due to lack of Greek.

I still strongly recommend that you read The Book of the New Sun. There are no made-up words in the whole thing. And it is kind of mind-blowing as you realize things as you go.

Maybe not so much as the Short Sun series, which is more mind-blowing: it confuses you when the narrator isn’t who he thinks he is. :)

The Soldier series is good if you like the pre-Roman days when Greece was on top.

Although in the book you can see the power balance shifting already.

@Rob If you are around, I want to say things that one may wish to delete having read them.

Robusto

8:55 PM

@tchrist I'm back. What's up?

@tchrist Sounds interesting.

Also, if you want to reach me privately, my email address is the first three letters of my given name plus my last name, as one word, lower case, at gmail.com.

Have to help with dinner now. AFK.

Johan Larsson

9:16 PM

@tchrist I wanna know

Johan Larsson

9:27 PM