On Nov 24, 2007 5:31 PM, Ed Montgomery <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The really scary people are like James Platt (who, > unfortunately is no longer with us), on the OED team, > who was famously quoted as saying: > > consulted "linguistic advisers," such as James Platt > "who knew scores of languages
I had a high school teacher like that. We were pretty sure he could speak more than 20 languages, although we never asked. Every year or two he would take up another, learning in part by teaching the extracurricular Language Club. I learned a bit of Swahili and Chinese this way. > and once famously > declared that the first twelve tongues were always the > most difficult, but having mastered them, the > following hundred should not pose too much of a > problem." I have said the same thing about computer languages. You should know how to express the common algorithms and data structures in LISP, FORTH, APL, Smalltalk, SQL (or better still QBE), and some more conventional language like C or Python in order to understand what it is possible to say, and have some idea how to say it given different kinds of facilities. After that, almost everything is an instance of something you know well. Programmers used to be mostly aggressively monolingual in the days of FORTRAN and COBOL, but you can't operate that way anymore, what with XML (LISP with named parentheses), various scripting languages, and the like. -- Edward Cherlin Earth Treasury: End Poverty at a Profit http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Earth_Treasury "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
