In one of Grace Hopper's lectures she mentions that she intially made a multilingual programming language, but this upset the people she showed it to, as it would make it easier to use for people who didn't speak English, so that feature was removed.
I have thought ever since, that this descision is something that has fundamentally affected the culture of software development in a number of profoundly negative ways.
COM supports multilingual components. Nobody uses it because having different names for the same things makes it harder for humans to reason about the subsequent code.
After searching for documentation on this feature of COM, I have another theory as to why people do not use it. And it is very similar to the reason why Arthur Dent found it surprising that his house was being knocked down to make way for a bypass.
Hmm, that sounds like one of those anecdotes that is retold for more drama than fact. So I looked it up.
I found this which merely sounds like a managers sensible YAGNI decision.
> Management was concerned that Hopper’s plans were too ambitious, and that the Automatic Programming Department was wasting time and energy exploring such marginal areas as multilingual programming. “It was completely self-evident [to management] that an American computer built in blue-belt Pennsylvania couldn’t possibly be programmed in French or German,” she recalled. Hopper had to assure her superiors that the proposed business language would only be in English.
>Management was concerned that Hopper’s plans were too ambitious, and that the Automatic Programming Department was wasting time and energy exploring such marginal areas as multilingual programming.
This is not at all the impression given by Grace. Also, I'll note this explanation makes no logical sense given that it was the first demo to management of something that management had already told Grace she wouldn't be able to do at all. If they were concerned at the waste of time and energy, they would presumably have stopped her when they believed that what she was working on was never going to work, rather than requesting the removal of a feature that had been implemented in the first demo.
Here is Grace's take on it, from her MIT lecture -
'We'd like to run this German program for you...' Have you figured out what happened to us? That thing hit the fan. It was absolutely obvious, that a respectable American computer, built in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, could not understand French or German. And I had to spend the next four months saying no, no, no, no, no, no! We wouldn't think of programming it in anything but English.
edit - I just checked the dates. Never mind logical sense, the explanation fails chronological sense. Her demo was in 1952 and she became the very first director of Eckert–Mauchly's newly formed Department of Automatic Programming, sometime in 1954. They definitely were not worried about time and energy being wasted in a department that wouldn't even exist for another two years.
I think it’s legitimate for Welsh speakers to advocate for the Welsh language, just as I think it’s legitimate for English speakers to advocate for the English language. As a native English speaker, I don’t want to make it easy for the world to speak languages other than English either.
Oh, for fuck's sake. Alexa not speaking Welsh is hardly a "horror story." Alexa doesn't speak your language? Don't buy it. It's not "[telling] you which language your family can speak at home," it's offering a service to the fattest part of the market first.
The revival of Welsh (and Welsh Wikipedia) is a wonderful thing, but the framing of the article is awful.
For what it's worth, I live in Hawaii, where the native language and culture (and government) were also brutally suppressed. Currently there are less than 10,000 native speakers of the Hawaiian language. There's been an uptick with the recent creation of Hawaiian-language immersion schools, though. You know what Wikipedia doesn't have? A Hawaiian version, even though it's named for a Hawaiian (wiki) word.
Please don't belittle minority languages or societies. While your observation might be suitable, the language is not.
People who define themselves as a member of a minority group tend to be sensitive. Their group might have experienced gruesome oppression. They tend to be hurt quickly.
So you need to be careful in expressing your opinion, especially if you view yourself as the member of one of the majority groups.
I explicitly did not belittle Welsh society or the Welsh language. If you care to take exception to my language as simply inappropriate, I'll concede and apologize. If you insist on taking it as an insult to minority groups (your perception, not my intention), well ... I won't do anything. Including apologize. My condemnation isn't aimed at the Welsh or minority groups but specifically at the author of the article, Stephen Harrison, whose ancestry I'm wholly unaware of.
Bear with me -- I often wonder whether, for subjects which transcend cultural differences, Wikipedia should only allow non-English pages where English-native pages do not exist. My reason is that I suspect that the English-native versions of pages will tend to be the highest quality due to editor volume/attention, etc, and I do not want non-English speaking communities to be disadvantaged by lower quality Wikipedia content. So, the suggestion would be intense focus on automatic translation of English pages, rather than creation of parallel pages in n languages.
I am afraid there's a deal breaker to this interesting idea.
Some languages are in some areas a lot more expressive than English. (Beware of the Blub paradoxon where in programming languages someone doesn't understand concepts not present in the programming language he uses: for natural languages this means that speaker of one language might have some difficulty to grasp the expressiveness of another language.)
This means if there is a language which could describe something more easily than English then you shouldn't deny the possibility of a non-English page.
Sure. Fairly rare though? I think English will be as adequate as any natural language to describe most core phenomena of our physical universe and human culture.
Signed Languages of the Deaf are more expressive describing form, motion and dynamics in the 3D-space and also subtle differences in emotion than English and German. Bernese German also seems to be more expressive expressing emotions related to the body, working and being at ease compared to High German. These are the examples I have encountered myself so I don't believe this to be really rare.
There's a thing where English really excels. It has a gigantic lexicon with many words differing in subtle aspects, so you can be very precise. This also makes it easy to create puns.
People who use localized Wikipedia are, in my experience, either a) looking for something not present in en.wiki or b) not proficient in English.
I don't see how it would help, if this is the case. Plus, also in the English Wikipedia, is not that pages are born complete. It's a refinement process. If you remove the stubs, wouldn't it become a self-fulfilling prophecy?
That's what I was getting at with "for subjects which transcend cultural differences". It's hard to name something which transcends cultural differences and doesn't have an English-language wikipedia page.
> b) not proficient in English.
Yes, my suggestion was that Wikipedia should focus on excellent translations of content that is originally generated in English. Perhaps the software would highlight passages needing translation help from the non-English-language editors would who today be working on parallel/redundant pages in non-English languages. ("the suggestion would be intense focus on automatic translation of English pages, rather than creation of parallel pages in n languages.")
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 70.4 ms ] threadI have thought ever since, that this descision is something that has fundamentally affected the culture of software development in a number of profoundly negative ways.
I found this which merely sounds like a managers sensible YAGNI decision.
> Management was concerned that Hopper’s plans were too ambitious, and that the Automatic Programming Department was wasting time and energy exploring such marginal areas as multilingual programming. “It was completely self-evident [to management] that an American computer built in blue-belt Pennsylvania couldn’t possibly be programmed in French or German,” she recalled. Hopper had to assure her superiors that the proposed business language would only be in English.
https://epdf.pub/grace-hopper-and-the-invention-of-the-infor...
This is not at all the impression given by Grace. Also, I'll note this explanation makes no logical sense given that it was the first demo to management of something that management had already told Grace she wouldn't be able to do at all. If they were concerned at the waste of time and energy, they would presumably have stopped her when they believed that what she was working on was never going to work, rather than requesting the removal of a feature that had been implemented in the first demo.
Here is Grace's take on it, from her MIT lecture -
'We'd like to run this German program for you...' Have you figured out what happened to us? That thing hit the fan. It was absolutely obvious, that a respectable American computer, built in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, could not understand French or German. And I had to spend the next four months saying no, no, no, no, no, no! We wouldn't think of programming it in anything but English.
She starts the topic at around 59 minutes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR0ujwlvbkQ
edit - I just checked the dates. Never mind logical sense, the explanation fails chronological sense. Her demo was in 1952 and she became the very first director of Eckert–Mauchly's newly formed Department of Automatic Programming, sometime in 1954. They definitely were not worried about time and energy being wasted in a department that wouldn't even exist for another two years.
https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yird
The revival of Welsh (and Welsh Wikipedia) is a wonderful thing, but the framing of the article is awful.
For what it's worth, I live in Hawaii, where the native language and culture (and government) were also brutally suppressed. Currently there are less than 10,000 native speakers of the Hawaiian language. There's been an uptick with the recent creation of Hawaiian-language immersion schools, though. You know what Wikipedia doesn't have? A Hawaiian version, even though it's named for a Hawaiian (wiki) word.
Well despite the first sentence "He puke documents and Wikipedia", the translation seems consistent.
People who define themselves as a member of a minority group tend to be sensitive. Their group might have experienced gruesome oppression. They tend to be hurt quickly.
So you need to be careful in expressing your opinion, especially if you view yourself as the member of one of the majority groups.
Some languages are in some areas a lot more expressive than English. (Beware of the Blub paradoxon where in programming languages someone doesn't understand concepts not present in the programming language he uses: for natural languages this means that speaker of one language might have some difficulty to grasp the expressiveness of another language.)
This means if there is a language which could describe something more easily than English then you shouldn't deny the possibility of a non-English page.
There's a thing where English really excels. It has a gigantic lexicon with many words differing in subtle aspects, so you can be very precise. This also makes it easy to create puns.
People who use localized Wikipedia are, in my experience, either a) looking for something not present in en.wiki or b) not proficient in English.
I don't see how it would help, if this is the case. Plus, also in the English Wikipedia, is not that pages are born complete. It's a refinement process. If you remove the stubs, wouldn't it become a self-fulfilling prophecy?
That's what I was getting at with "for subjects which transcend cultural differences". It's hard to name something which transcends cultural differences and doesn't have an English-language wikipedia page.
> b) not proficient in English.
Yes, my suggestion was that Wikipedia should focus on excellent translations of content that is originally generated in English. Perhaps the software would highlight passages needing translation help from the non-English-language editors would who today be working on parallel/redundant pages in non-English languages. ("the suggestion would be intense focus on automatic translation of English pages, rather than creation of parallel pages in n languages.")