Re: Imperialism (OT) (Was: No call for Ada)

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic.brenta@insalien.org>]

"Robert I. Eachus" <rieachus@comcast.net> writes:
> 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.

Aye.  This was a myth invented by Winston Churchill so that Great
Britain wouldn't be the only dwarf between the US, Soviet and Chinese
giants.  De Gaulle encouraged this myth because he wanted to avoid a
civil war between former Resistants and former Collaborators.  Both
good reasons, IMHO, and it actually worked for the intended purposes,
but still a myth, and there are those who recognise it as such.  (and
before anyone asks: I am French).

> Sure in Austria there is a consistent world view:  Austrian beer is
> better than any other beer, including German. ;-)

Surely you haven't tasted Belgian beer.  Next time you're in Brussels,
give me a call and I'll treat you to some :)

> 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.)

French grammar is horrendously complex; you need a very Cartesian mind
to master it.  At the same time, it and the vocabulary allow all kinds
of nuances (you can convey different ideas by just swapping words, for
example).  Latin is also very good for forming such minds.

> 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).

All this is, I think, not so much "Because [we] lost the bloody war"
as because "the US won the war" :)

BTW, Jean Ichbiah is French and he led the origigal Green (then Ada)
design team.  Quite a good ilustration of your point.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.