Re: No call for Ada (was Re: Announcing new scripting/prototyping language)

["Robert I. Eachus" <rieachus@comcast.net>]

Alexandre E. Kopilovitch wrote:

I said:
>>This effect can 
>>also be seen in spoken languages you can't understand the French and the 
>>people of Quebec unless you can think in French.  (I am the first to 
>>admit I can't.  I can try, but I find the exercise very strenuous.  I 
>>need to literally accept a foreign viewpoint to do it well and I am 
>>unwilling to do so.

>>The cultural baggage with Arabic and Chinese is 
>>larger that that which comes with French, but it isn't as imperialistic.

> 
> This sentence seems quite strange... well, not exactly. I can't believe that
> you know so much about Arabic or Chinese culture that you can estimate whether
> or not it is imperialistic. After all, most of their cultural baggages (which
> are large, as you said) were created during their corresponding Imperial ages.
> Not knowing French (as you said) you certainly can't judge French cultural
> baggade in this aspect as well. But you did that, and there is a clear cause
> for that - you see French as the most important center of resistance against
> worldwide propagation of American viewpoint. Well, I think that this feeling
> is quite correct, and this is why recently I gradually become interested in
> learning French (there are, and always were other reasons of course, but this
> new additional one has a chance to be decisive).

I think you misunderstood.  I speak French well enough to get along, in 
both Paris and Quebec--although my accent is hardly Parisian.  But I 
can't fit my thoughts inside the language imposed worldview.  So when I 
am speaking French I am thinking in English then translating.  (I don't 
have to go through that step when listening.)  It has been awhile since 
I studied Chinese, long enough that the new transliterations still seem 
strange.  And I suspect I would feel more at home in Taiwan than 
mainland China.

>>Japanese on the other hand, is much more demanding than French,  but in 
>>another sense it is not as hard.  Japanese requires you to act in 
>>certain ways, but it doesn't try as hard to impose its worldview on you. 
>>...
>>However, I have found 
>>that there is a huge difference in world view between those Japanese who 
>>speak English and those who don't,
> 
> This passage about Japanese vividly reminds me the following anecdote:
> 
> ----------
> A Pan Am 727 flight engineer waiting for start clearance in Munich overheard
> the following:
> 
> Lufthansa (in German): Ground, what is our start clearance time?"
> 
> Ground (in English): "If you want an answer you must speak English."
> 
> Lufthansa (in English): "I am a German, flying a German airplane, in Germany.
> Why must I speak English?"
> 
> Unknown voice (in a beautiful British accent): "Because you lost the bloody
> war!"

And the French pretend they were on the winning side, rather than losing 
early, being occupied for years, and then liberated by the Allies. ;-) 
In fact in French, it is hard to think of French military history as 
other than glorious.

> I can't speak for Germanic languages, but for Russian I tend to agree. Yes,
> I don't think that Russian, as a language, is substantially associated with
> any specific viewpoint. (But its Soviet flavour certainly was... I hope it is
> obvious.)
> 
> But just one external observation about Germanic languages: although it may
> be true that the whole family of Germanic languages isn't substantially
> associated with any particular viewpoint, this seems to be false for one
> particular area, and the corresponding language flavour: Austria. It seems
> that there, in Austria, some coherent viewpoint was present (I don't know
> whether it is still alive).

Sure in Austria there is a consistent world view:  Austrian beer is 
better than any other beer, including German. ;-)  Seriously the 
Austrian culture is very relaxed compared to northern Germany.  But I 
spent a couple years in Bavaria, and the culture there seemed very 
similar to Austria.  (In fact, I think that southern German is still 
more religious and fun loving than Austria, but compared to northern 
Germany, the difference is relatively minor.)

All this is sort of very off topic for this newsgroup, with one 
exception.  The languages that we discussed as not imposing world views 
seem to be required learning at a young age (usually as a "milk tongue") 
to be any good at building compilers and designing programming 
languages.  (There are some excellent language designers in France, but 
they all seem to speak fluent English.  So it may be that if French is 
your milk tongue you can learn another language later, and still commit 
language design.)  I have often felt that this was due to some spoken 
languages being easily extensible, and others forcing you into another 
language if you want to add a new concept.  The two extremes seem to be 
English and Japanese.

All popular programming languages seem to have an English heritage.  In 
fact it is almost surprising that there are a few languages with more of 
a British background than American.  (Algol, especially Algol 68, and 
Coral 66 come to mind.)  There have been a few German and Russian 
programming languages, but none has made it into the mainstream.  There 
have been a few languages from non-English speaking areas.  SIMSCRIPT 
has a Scandinavian heritage.  However, it is hard to contend that 
English is not the primary language in some areas of Scandinavia. Wirth 
who designed Pascal and Algol-W among other languages, was Dutch.  But 
all those languages have a clear English heritage (and documentation).

-- 
                                           Robert I. Eachus

"The war on terror is a different kind of war, waged capture by capture, 
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