> Without Googling, name any famous developer from Japan. Or China. Or Russia. Yukihiro Matsumoto. Rasmus Lerdorf. Guido van Rossum.
Not exactly a developer, but how about Xiaoyun Wang?
Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
191–200 of 260 posts
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#192"It’s almost impossible to feel like part of a community if you’re not highly proficient in the language. Even non-native speakers who are fluent enough to read posts in their second or third languages often aren’t comfortable enough to write in them." Wow, this is true! I am brazilian and you have no idea how much effort I put in writing every single comment here on HN. And the longer de comment is, the more stupid…
Agreed, writing posts/comments in English as a non-native speaker (with anxiety issues) is a real endeavour. Thankfully I've put so much time in it already that I can be reasonably certain that what I write is correct, and "flows" well, but I can definitely relate to your struggles.
You seem to be doing well. I would not have known that you were not a native speaker if you had not said so.
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
> edit: I noticed I just wrote "de" instead of "the". Stupidest mistake I often make. I've worked with a lot of developers from China, who themselves work with developers in India. On a conference call the China sysadmin announces they've verified the C Jia Jia environment and the India developer totally knows what they mean. C++ in Mandarin is pronounced C Jia Jia. Don't sweat it.
Weird, I work in China and have never heard C++ referred to as C加加. Many of my coworkers feel uncomfortable using English sometimes, but I never have a problem understanding them. The Indians speak English at work (in India at least) out of habit.
Drop it in a conversation and try :)
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Weird, I work in China and have never heard C++ referred to as C加加. Many of my coworkers feel uncomfortable using English sometimes, but I never have a problem understanding them. The Indians speak English at work (in India at least) out of habit.
Drop it in a conversation and try :)
I could try, but I can't get C加油 out of my head.
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your written English is better than the vast majority of our current undergraduate college students in America, so I really wouldn't worry about it.
Although native-English speakers are always nice enough to tell me that my English is "good enough" to be understood, there are times that I feel uneasy with myself, because I just lack the practice to be able to communicate fluently in English.
If you ever want someone to speak English with, I'm Arthur Colle, and you can find me at facebook (dot) com (slash) arthurcolle
:)
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#196"It’s almost impossible to feel like part of a community if you’re not highly proficient in the language. Even non-native speakers who are fluent enough to read posts in their second or third languages often aren’t comfortable enough to write in them." Wow, this is true! I am brazilian and you have no idea how much effort I put in writing every single comment here on HN. And the longer de comment is, the more stupid…
There is a real brutal grammar nazi trend I've been seeing recently on various sites - apparently, someone gets a buzz of self entitled superiority off of correcting someones grammar mistakes. Personally? I think English is insanely stupid, inefficient, and dumb. I speak it because I have to, not because I want to, because everyone else does it. If you think trying to get breakout success in a market with, say, a sof…
> And your words are a huffman tree - the most popular ones are the shortest
Problem with that is that it leaves very little room for error detection in the language -- everything is a valid statement.
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#197Adoption of English language is one of the major reasons, why 3rd world countries like our, India and Pakistan are thriving in IT. I feel sad for nations, who are stubborn in their adoption of English language, merely out of political reasons. Even from a political perspective, this is sad, because you can't convey your point of view to others. Oh and by the way, India is 2nd and Pakistan is 3rd largest country by nu…
This is pure bullshit in so many ways. There is no stubbornness. Why do you assume that? Speaking English is not a magic thing that will remove a country from a bad conditionm, if that's what you're assuming. Moreover, other countries like India and Pakistan may have other pressing issues to solve before learning a second language (e.g. sanitation, education, etc). Or they might not need it at all! Their country or r…
While I agree that it is no stubbornness to not to learn English (there are many factors), though learning it has certainly been better for earning a living for many Indians. It is also great for the world. Had the mathematicians like S.N. Bose, Ramanujan not known English as their second/third language, the whole world would have been at loss. India doesn't have a 'national language' which everyone must learn. English helps them (Indians themselves) stay connected and to be able to converse.
Same goes with the world. If there is a global language everyone speaks, it's good for everyone.
Though I think English is a bad choice for being the 'global language', but here we are, with it being the official language of most countries in the world.
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#198"It’s almost impossible to feel like part of a community if you’re not highly proficient in the language. Even non-native speakers who are fluent enough to read posts in their second or third languages often aren’t comfortable enough to write in them." Wow, this is true! I am brazilian and you have no idea how much effort I put in writing every single comment here on HN. And the longer de comment is, the more stupid…
There is a real brutal grammar nazi trend I've been seeing recently on various sites - apparently, someone gets a buzz of self entitled superiority off of correcting someones grammar mistakes. Personally? I think English is insanely stupid, inefficient, and dumb. I speak it because I have to, not because I want to, because everyone else does it. If you think trying to get breakout success in a market with, say, a sof…
> create an "optimal" language (ie, glyphs only trace to possible human vocalization
There comes Chinese characters, which are exactly the opposite of your definition of "optimal": Chinese characters are not an alphabet, they do not carry phonetics, they carry meaning. And, guess what, this is arguably better.
Why? Because phonetics tend to shift quickly. In a few decennies any spoken language has shifted, vocalisation is different, especially when the language is used by loosely coulped communities. And then you have to adapt spelling to new pronunciations. But what do you do with old books? And how do you keep the language united? Chinese characters, by allowing different pronunciations without changing their written form, do fix this issue. This has helped China to stay centralized for a long time, and share one common continuous cultural ground.
So, if optimal means "can be shared by more people for a longer period of time" maybe the optimal language would need to add an articulation, and represent meanings instead of sounds.
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a real brutal grammar nazi trend I've been seeing recently on various sites - apparently, someone gets a buzz of self entitled superiority off of correcting someones grammar mistakes. Personally? I think English is insanely stupid, inefficient, and dumb. I speak it because I have to, not because I want to, because everyone else does it. If you think trying to get breakout success in a market with, say, a sof…
I wouldn't say Esperanto is 100% optimal, but it was created from scratch by linguists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto
When I think "optimal language", I don't think "optimal combination of natural languages". This is partly because I've been experimenting with constructed languages (conlangs) since the age of eight and partly because my ethical and aesthetic desires lead me to different (or at least more elaborated) goals than "better communication between the peoples of the world as they exist today".
There are many conlangs for various purposes. Esperanto and Interlingua are useful for facilitating communication between people, acting as geography-blind APIs. Lojban is useful for communication between humans and computers, as well as fostering a strict logical mindset similar to the effects of working with programming languages, mathematics or symbolic logic. Klingon, Elvish and many other languages of various semantic/syntactic comprehensiveness are created for aesthetic and/or fictional purposes.
I've been working through a new conlang idea in my head the past few days. It builds off of Lojban in that its tenets are (1) universality, and (2) ease of I/O by both humans and machines. But it adds onto that (3) an easy-to-use, potentially unconscious system of real-time abstraction.
We do this to some extent with all human-human communication, when we inflect or affect or twitch or sigh or use other non-verbal linguistic cues to impart semantic value onto entire complex utterances. The way that a hyperlink imparts the contents of its destination onto the meaning of the information between its opening and closing tags.
This could be significantly sped up through use of more standardized multi-sensory linguistic components, either attached directly to individual people or attached as a metadata layer readable by nearby people through an AR technology of some sort (glasses are the obvious choice, but let's not limit ourselves).
For instance, a speaker could say the word "lu" multiple times in the same monologue. Those around the speaker would grok the intended meaning of "lu" each time due to whatever technological cues were broadcast along with it. The cues could be a string of words on a HUD or a color tinting the image of the speaker or a soft harmony in the listener's ear or a distinct pattern of buzzes from piezo elements in an ankle bracelet or even direct electrical stimulus causing a particular mental state.
I'm getting ahead of myself.
The point is that this is the sort of thing I imagine "language optimization" to be. And this example is just scratching the surface of potential optimizations, because any optimization that allows for general abstraction opens up all the doors of Turing completeness.
Esperanto and Interlingua are patches. They are certainly useful for some things[1], but we can't know what they're optimal for unless we're also experimenting with entirely new systems not based solely on natural languages. We need to be able to treat real-time language as scripting — anything less and we'll be limited by the language rather than by our cognition.
[1] Try reading this wikipedia page. Note how your reading speed increases exponentially as you go down the page: https://ia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua