9 Mar
2000
9 Mar
'00
6:45 a.m.
> Well, throw-in-the-towel is known (at least the
acording
> phrase is in wide use in Germany - just most don't know
> the orgin), but what is Ebonyx ?
Ebonyx was the attempt by some boards of education in
California to establish
the slang associated with Black culture as a language so they could get funding
to teach english as a second language. It was always a brazen attempt to get
funding, nothing more.
:))
Serious,
ain't we are going exactly the same way with
programming languages as with real ones ? Just instead
of centuries, it took only some dozend years to go from
Machine code (grunting sounds) to ADA (Goethes Poems)
*laugh* I'm not sure
I'd compare any computer language to Goethe, but it's
a good analogy... > and only less than 10 years to fall back to C ?
I think Hans is making a bit of a joke here, but
he's not far from the mark.
A living language is not a static thing. It grows. It evolves. Parts are
added and other parts dropped as the society that speaks it changes. Until
recently (ie the last 20 years or so) English was taught in a very prescriptive
way - x is the correct way to speak, where x is whatever dictionary and/or
grammar system you embrace.
No, I'm bloody serious (beside some humorous thing). In my opinion
C (and C++) is way down the ladder and as more as I think about I
find it more and more similar to the 'real' language thing discussed
in here.
I wouldn't consider C as anything 'grown'. maybe evolved in the
sense of degeneration.
I often think about what happened - why are all other languages
out classed ? Some beauty(and use)full are almost forgotten.
What happened to Pascal, Modula or Smalltalk (not to talk about
ADA which I still consider the best design ever) ?
There's only C (no, I don't recognize C++ or Java on their own).
And interestingly a still existing COBOL population.
However in the late 60s (things take time to
filter into the education system) some language experts - notably Webster's
Dictionary among them - began to realise that language *changes* over time.
Websters dictionary embraced a descriptive philosophy - we're not in the
business of telling you how you SHOULD speak, only how you DO speak.
One of the results of this was the formation of the
American Heritage
dictionary, which clung to the prescriptive philosophy.
Well, to late over here - Standard German has equalized most German
languages and dialects. More than 100 years of Education did succeede.
Anyway
H.
--
VCF Europa am 29./30. April 2000 in Muenchen
http://www.vintage.org/vcfe
http://www.homecomputer.de/vcfe