On 7/30/2011 8:32 AM, Alan Kay wrote:
By the way, a wonderful example of the "QWERTY phenomenon" is that
both the Greeks and the Romans actually did calculations with an
on-table or on-the-ground abacus that did have a zero (the term for
the small stone employed was a "calculus") but used a much older set
of conventions for writing numbers down.
(One can imagine the different temperaments involved in the odd
arrangement above -- which is very much many such odd arrangements
around us in the world today ...)
possibly the roman numerals actually made a good deal of sense on an
abacus, given they could be used to encode the state of said abacus?...
(although this would make more sense if only suffixes were used).
if so, I guess the difference now would be that modern people tend to
have a different perspective WRT numbers, thinking more of linear spaces
with digit rollover (more like an odometer or similar), hence to the
modern mind the roman-numeral system seems far less sane.
meanwhile, a few times I have idly wondered about the possibility where
everything migrated to base-16 (although preferably with non-letter
characters to replace A-F, possibly following the curve aesthetic of the
other numbers), in which case all of arithmetic could be decomposed into
bit operations.
this being because at base-2, the rules are a bit more elegant, more
like logic ops, whereas at base 10 they are a little more arbitrary, and
base-16 builds directly on the base 2 rules.
however, granted, doing this would be almost entirely impractical.
it is notable how, historically, most attempts at simplification and
reform (spelling reform; use of alternate/"simplified" alphabets and
writing systems; ...) have managed to fairly consistently go nowhere
(even when people are raised with them, they tend to revert to the prior
conventions once they start dealing with the wider world).
say, a historical example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deseret_alphabet
part of this may be because, in general, the
psychological/economical/... costs of change are much higher than those
of the continued use of the old conventions.
however, when conventions compete and one offers some clear advantages
(say arabic vs roman numerals), generally the better convention will
tend to win out given enough time.
or, at least, these are a few thoughts...
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