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Write Software in Latin (2025) [video]

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Re: Write Software in Latin (2025) [video]

#12

  From:  hermann@cpsc.ucalgary.ca (Michael Hermann)
  Subject:  Programmming awards
  Date:  10 Feb 89
  
  At Calgary, the computer science department has an award called
  the Williams Cup (as in old stained coffee cup), which is given
  yearly to the student who hands in the most imaginative
  rendition of a regular programming assignment.  Anyway, as the
  story goes, the cup was awarded to a student who'd done a desk
  calculator assignment.  Seems that the prof hadn't specified
  that you had to do it in decimal, so his/her program did math
  with _roman_numerals_.
  
  The clincher for the award must have been his/her programming
  style, since of course, the documentation was in _latin_.
— https://www.cs.earlham.edu/~skylar/humor/Unix/computer.folkl...>

Re: Write Software in Latin (2025) [video]

#13
Seems inaccurate to claim that "America" broke the Nazi's Enigma code - most of that work was done at Bletchley Park by British codebreakers, was it not? Of course Britian is still an Anglophone country and certainly lots of pioneering computing work in general was done in English by either Americans or British people, so it doesn't affect his broader point.

Re: Write Software in Latin (2025) [video]

#15

Seems inaccurate to claim that "America" broke the Nazi's Enigma code - most of that work was done at Bletchley Park by British codebreakers, was it not? Of course Britian is still an Anglophone country and certainly lots of pioneering computing work in general was done in English by either Americans or British people, so it doesn't affect his broader point.

It was actually first cracked by Marian Rejewski at the Polish Cipher Bureau and the details were handed over to Bletchley Park at the start of the war.

Re: Write Software in Latin (2025) [video]

#16
This guy lost me right at the beginning. He says that we write software in English because the USA won World War II with the help of the Colossus computer to break codes. Then he shows a picture of ENIAC, and suggests it was also used in World War II codebreaking.

This is completely wrong - it was the British who used computers to break codes during that war. Colossus was built for that purpose by the British. ENIAC was built in the USA but did not become operational until after the war and was not used for codebreaking.

I quit watching after that. I don't trust anyone who garbles well-known history that badly to tell my why we should write software in Latin.

Instead, let this other guy tell you why you should write software in Latin -- and show you how! He's the real deal - he programs in C89 with Latin keywords, by using the C preprocessor:

https://github.com/farant/rhubarb/blob/main/docs/old/latina....

Re: Write Software in Latin (2025) [video]

#18

This guy lost me right at the beginning. He says that we write software in English because the USA won World War II with the help of the Colossus computer to break codes. Then he shows a picture of ENIAC, and suggests it was also used in World War II codebreaking. This is completely wrong - it was the British who used computers to break codes during that war. Colossus was built for that purpose by the British. ENIAC…

Such corrections become even more important in the age of LLMs where we're gonna see more fake stuff. I honestly thought this is some kind of a joke but it turned out be a talk.

Re: Write Software in Latin (2025) [video]

#19
post #8

Perl was there decades ago: https://metacpan.org/dist/Lingua-Romana-Perligata/view/lib/L...

The perl $, @, %, etc. being compared to declensions is amusing.

I feel like you need to know something about perl and latin (both considered outdated) to get this joke.

For those who don't: in perl, the same text identifier can have a different meaning depending on these prefixes, i.e. $foo is scalar, @foo is array, %foo is a hash (dictionary). Likewise latin (like most old indo European languages) has a bunch of suffixes to indicate what is happening with a noun or adjective: is it a subject, direct object, possessive, used as a tool or location, etc.

Re: Write Software in Latin (2025) [video]

#20

This guy lost me right at the beginning. He says that we write software in English because the USA won World War II with the help of the Colossus computer to break codes. Then he shows a picture of ENIAC, and suggests it was also used in World War II codebreaking. This is completely wrong - it was the British who used computers to break codes during that war. Colossus was built for that purpose by the British. ENIAC…

> Don't use nomen as a variable name. Seriously. It's a macro for typedef

For all the warnings so far about not using nomen as a variable, wonder why not just do "typus_definire", since both "type" and "define" are Latin-derived...

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