Re: polymophism

[Richard Riehle <rriehle@nunic.nu.edu>]

On Fri, 22 Nov 1996, Klaus Brouwer wrote:

in response to the following, 


> > Note I don't want to get into the fruitless religious war over whether
> > 
> > The_object.Do_something (now);
> > 
> > or
> > 
> > Do_Something (The_Object, Now)
> > 
> > is better.

you said,

> Would be better, since 
> 
> [The_Object do_someting:now]
> 
> is best.

which leads me to wonder if you think Russian is a better language
than Chinese because the grammar and syntax of Russian more closely
follows your preference in programming syntax?  

These arguments about syntax are generally pretty much nonsense since 
there is no such thing as a "natural" order in language.  There is simply
the order we have learned in our native language and the biases inherent
in having no knowledge of a radically different language.  

This cultural bias shows up all the time by evaluating programming
languages according to syntactic features while ignoring the importance of
expressibility.  The phenomenom is not new. It manifests
itself as an inhibitor in students trying to learn the spoken language of
another culture when they continually look  for similarities to the
language they already know. 

Richard Riehle