Re: Latin, Shakespeare, and other irrelevant topics

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com>]

On Tue, 30 Jan 2001, Robert Dewar wrote:
> In article <954e7d$8q61@news.cis.okstate.edu>,
>   dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org wrote:
> >. If you require someone to know a language inside
> > and out before having an opinion on it, only the people who
> will have
> > an opinion on it are those who love it enough to spend all
> that time
> > learning it.
> 
> 
> You do not have to "love" a language to spend time learning
> it. Indeed the idea of expending such a deep emotion as love
> on some technical artifical language is a bit sad ....

From MW Pocket 
love: 4 to take pleasure in <~s to play bridge>

It's usually considered bad form to deliberately misinterpret someone's 
words like that. In general, I try very hard to find a reasonable (to me :)
interpretation of a statement that looks odd. When I say "I love movies" 
or "I love chess" it's not the same sense as "I love my wife" or "I love
my son", but, like Ada, English permits overloading.  

The rest is fine, but skirts David Starner's point. How well do you have
to know a language before you can be said to comment on it in an informed
manner? I don't know C++ like the back of my hand. I don't have a PhD in 
Shakespeare studies. I haven't implemented an Ada compiler, nor have I 
held political office. Should I just shut up about all of these topics?

-- Brian

> If have NOT learned a language, then you don't know it. If
> you don't know it, then you really can't comment on it
> in an informed manner, and what happens is that people tend
> to borrow their pseudo-opinions from what they have heard.
> 
> So for example, lots of people will dismiss COBOL as too
> verbose, which overall is plain technical nonsense (when I
> gave a talk at Berkeley on COBOL, I spent time addressing
> this silly issue just because so many people are under
> this illusion -- we took several standard algorithms, and
> programmed them in several languages, and COBOL came out
> as short or shorter than the competition, both in characters
> and token count :-) Of course this is a totally uninteresting
> issue anyway, and has nothing to do with the things that make
> COBOL an interesting language :-)
> 
> With regard to assembly language, you cannot have an opinion
> on AL from a language point of view unless you have reasonable
> working knowledge of an AL.
> 
> It is really a rule of all honest intellectual approaches that
> you cannot offer opinions on things you don't know about. If
> you have not read Dickens, then you do NOT go selling other's
> opinions of Dickens as though they were your own!
> 
> 
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