On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 8:37 PM, Steve Howell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Kirby, thanks for the updates. Below are the statements that were most > throught-provoking to me. See my reactions. > > > --- On Thu, 9/25/08, kirby urner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Computer programming languages are "disruptive > > technology" pure and > > simple, and there's no easy way to phase them in to > > high school mathematics > > classes without breaking backward compatibility in some > > ways, duh. > > I totally agree with that. I also wonder how there can be convergences > between how we teach computer languages (Python, Javascript, etc.) and > natural languages (French, Spanish, etc.). Yes. I typically bring up J (the language) and the LEX Institute at this point, the former because the documentation consciously adopts "grammar" and "parts of speech" as the dominant paradigm, the latter because here you have human language learners (pioneers in techniques) tackling Fourier Transformations as a topic. O'Reilly's 'Head First' titles reminds me of LEX, per this blog post: > > > > > Anyway, the long and short of it is I'm still working > > with that charter in > > Alaska I mentioned in my Chicago talk, hammering on ASCII - > > to - Unicode as > > a "major story of our time" don't care what > > class it's taught in > > (sociology? anthropology?). [...] > > I agree with you that Unicode's a big story. I just wonder if fifty years > from now, we'll all be wondering how people ever survived without a single > small alphabet that we can all agree on. In fact, I'm wondering how many > people will be left in the world that can't read and write (a somewhat > evolved version of) English (in addition to their native languages). > > Having lived in the Philippines, I recognize the importance of a lingua franca, be that English or whatever and expect we'll continue to see "glue language" sinews keeping us globalizing productively. Romanji or Latin-1 definitely did us a big favor in being small and compact, running in < 1K one might say. Mnemonics like JMP and CMD, short words like "hex", are likely to stick around for the foreseeable future. But yeah, reams of source code in Cyrillic and Greek are already happening at higher levels than assembler, would be my educated guess, and our open source repositories will be reflecting those freedoms. Kirby
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