_4jlx · HackerTrans

6 years agodiscuss

Comparing languages with types to languages without types is like comparing conservatism to liberalism. Less rules = more change. How much of your newfound liking for typescript can be attributed to 'realizing' it's better and how much of it is simply because you're getting older?

_4jlx

6 years agodiscuss

First of all, you're looking for the word 'equivalent', not corollary. Secondly, a talented lawyer could make a convincing legal argument for anything. The holocaust was legal. So really, the morality of the act is everything. Sure in practice, children are supposed to be held for 72 hours, but in reality it can be much longer. I'm not sure if I'm addressing your claims because you're using a bunch of big words, and I'm not sure if you're trying to say what they actually mean, so thats what I got.

_4jlx

6 years agodiscuss

Okay, but in this case I'm not saying there's whataboutism in your argument. The point I'm trying to make is that if you're powerful enough, you can make human rights abuses and then get away with it scot-free and that America helped set this precedent.

_4jlx

6 years agodiscuss

This is not the information density we are referring to.

_4jlx

6 years agodiscuss

English is indeed better suited for a conventional computer keyboard, coding, and reading left to right. However, to me it's still unclear how much of this advantage is due to the fact that computers were specifically designed for english speakers.

_4jlx

6 years agodiscuss

This is because China has historically been much less colonialist than some other nations.

_4jlx

6 years agodiscuss

This is also from a study. The gist is that english single-digit numbers take longer to say/think than mandarin single-digit numbers (1/3 second vs 1/4 second), and so 9 digits in english be slightly too long to be consistently memorizable for most people.

There are more authoritative sources but this is what I found: https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/07/01/137527742/c...

Also, when I say them aloud or in my head, mandarin numbers are clearly shorter.

Upon further research, it seems like Vietnamese is also very information dense.

_4jlx

6 years agodiscuss

Just did a Google. From my napkin calculations, spanish has 66% the information density that mandarin has.

_4jlx

6 years agodiscuss

These are research findings, not my own ideas: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-language-for-math-1410...

_4jlx

6 years agodiscuss

Explain to me what language has to do with the great firewall. Are you implying that if I switch my iPhone keyboard to Mandarin, my speech will automatically get censored by the firewall?

_4jlx

6 years agodiscuss

The difference between Spanish and Mandarin is that Mandarin is much more information dense. In fact, it's the only widely spoken language more information dense than English.

Aside from that, english is just such a meh language. Asian kids get higher math scores in part because mandarin's numbering system actually makes sense ('eleven, twelve, thirteen' don't include the words one, two, or three, while the numerical representations include 1, 2, 3). You can consistently memorize a phone number in mandarin, but you can't in english because the syllables are too long. Thinking about money in mandarin biases people towards long term saving, while thinking about money in English biases people towards short term spending.

Basically, it's like a less drastic version of the movie 'Arrival'. I think not long after the idea that language can actively be designed to our benefit becomes more popular, we might be speaking an entirely language altogether. Language design is unlike city design or technology design in that there are no technological or budgetary constraints, no 'real world' tradeoffs to make. You can theoretically invent the perfect language tomorrow and it wouldn't cost you anything except time. One of the only things that can improve humans for basically free.

_4jlx

6 years agodiscuss

I have noticed a commonality between systems that are unintuitive to use like git and CSS: they didn't sufficiently mimic nature, or common everyday concepts.

Say you design a new relational DB. You want all the postgres and SQL people to switch so you adopt SQL as the querying language. Your DB becomes so popular that it eventually gains +80% market share. Many people now have to learn SQL as their first querying language and now you've created another git.

Another scenario is a system being appropriated for something else like CSS was (?).

Copying your competitors is simply not a guarantee that your system will stand the test of time. The only constant is nature.

_4jlx

6 years agodiscuss

Wow, this is the post I wasn't brave enough to write. Been developing in android for ~3 months for school and I still do not fully understand how to load listviews, and not for lack of trying. I want to know who this guy is so I can shake their hand.

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