Nick Sabalausky wrote:
"Justin Johansson" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
Nick Sabalausky wrote:
"Justin Johansson" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
Nick Sabalausky wrote:
Right, that's what I meant. Use a word starting with "retro-" when
talking to a english-speaking person, and even if they're uneducated,
they'll most likely have a good idea what is meant by that prefix.
What about persons with English not as a first language?
I do realize that different native languages can be an issue, but at some
point a library has to use *some* language, and the established standard
for phobos just happens to be english. If we start banning terms from use
in a language or a library on the basis of whether a non-native english
speaker is likely to know it, then I suspect (though I admit that I don't
know for certain) you'd have to eliminate most of the given
language/library because there's no guarantee non-native speakers would
know any of it.
For instance, if there were a russian-langauge library, and I tried to
use it, I wouldn't understand any of the words except nyet and da (and
I'm not even sure of the correct spellings of those - in either roman or
cyrillic). And I would be well aware that I wouldn't be able to assume I
knew what something did without a little digging. Of course, I certainly
sympathize that this can be a pain for non-native-english-speaking
programmers, and that it's an issue native english speaking programmers
like me will probably never be able to truly understand, but until we get
to some hypothetcal point in the future where everyone speaks the same
language, then, again, at some point there really is no choice but to
just assume at least some particular language.
Besides, computer terminology is already, at best, just a bunch of vague
meaphors anyway. When I started programing, it took me all of about a
minute to learn that "string" had nothing to do with the stuff cloth is
made of and stitched together with. And "SCSI" doesn't mean a damn thing
at all, even to an english speaker, but I still learned it quickly
enough. So even if I wasn't familiar with "retro" as anything other than
"old style", I'm sure I still could have gotten used to it very quickly,
especially considering that in 99.99% of contexts it's going to be pretty
damn clear that it's not being used to refer to bell-bottoms, chome
appliances, and flock-of-seagulls haircuts.
One famous mathematician, in writing to another famous mathematician,
once wrote "I apologize for the length of this letter, but I don't have
time to be brief".
So question is, are you the former famous mathematician?
Heh :) No, but one time I did have a college professor refer to my writing
style as "constipated". Can't say I disagreed ;)
Oh, Nick, that's a bit unkind of your prof; in any case I don't see a
connection between "constipated" and "voluminous". Keep on writing;
you have an amusing style as well as the occasional valid point :-)
