This feed contains pages in the “languages” category.
Last night was the first lesson of the German course I enrolled on. I now know four ways to ask somebody their name (two formal, two informal) and two ways to reply. Need to work on differentiating s, ß, and z, though.
We recently received our annual spamming by Plymouth On Course, who apparently are some sort of umbrella group for the various places in the city that do adult learning courses. Last year I considered signing up for one, but didn’t have the money; this year, I have the time and the money (at least, compared to next year), so I’ve just requested a place on a Beginner’s German course. (I considered French, as they have courses all the way up to A-level, but German seems more interesting, and they may have more advanced courses by the time I’m ready to do them anyway).
It starts at the end of September, every Tuesday evening until May.
TermiSoc’s annual general meeting was Tuesday; against my better judgement, I put myself forward for the position of president. Showing a lack of common sense that’s astounding even to people with experience of TermiSoc, they actually voted for me. So basically, I’m screwed.
I’ve been teaching myself Haskell; I found a tutorial that doesn’t assume you already get functional programming, and it’s really quite a nice language; I was going to try learning Scheme, after Dan’s tutorial on Monday, but the parentheses were driving me insane. The main problem I’m having with Haskell is dealing with its type system and the IO monad; I keep getting told that I can’t do things because my variables are IO strings or whatever, instead of normal ones. Other than that, it’s a really nice language; maybe I’ll do a tutorial on it next year.
Smalltalk and C++ are still on my <span class="createlink"><a href="http://subvert.org.uk/~bma/wiki.cgi?page=about%2Flanguages%2Fcomputer&from=journal%2Fentries%2F2008%2F03%2Fmisc-updates&do=create" rel="nofollow">?</a>list</span>, since they’re mandatory for the final-year course I want to take (Plymouth has a system whereby you can get a "Computing and Such-And-Such" degree instead of plain Computing, if you choose from a specific subset of the normally-allowed final-year modules; I’m going for Computing and Software Development). I’ll spend some time on both of them over the summer, if all goes to plan.
Just for kicks, the latest psychotic dribble from the Roman Catholic Church: apparently, abortion offends "the dignity and rights of women". They’d be more credible if pro-choicers hadn’t been saying for years that banning abortion does exactly that. Bishop Girotti, you fail.
I find it interesting that Unix commands that consist of an object and a verb put the object before the verb.
English, the first language of the original programmers (and many since then) doesn’t actually do that; there’s two possible groupings it could belong to.
Example: cdrecord, useradd
- Subject Object Verb: “I CD record”. “I user add”.
- Object Verb Subject: “CD record I”. “User add I”.
The first is the most common order, though apparently rare in European languages. The second is the rarest, apparently used mostly by some rather obscure languages and also Klingon. I’d be interested to learn why it’s so common in Unix.
Rich recently blogged about programming languages that never took off. I have to say, though, that I don’t agree with the article’s choice of languages, simply because a number of them were never intended to take off - things like brainfuck, Befunge, Intercal, and Java2k were created for the sake of it, not to become popular for any kind of “normal” usage.
Firstly, despite what Skippy says, Boris Johnson is neither a great person nor a great politician; he’s a member of the Conservative Party, which all but precludes either.
Getting to the point: AppleScipt is an awful, awful language. I tried writing a
scipt yesterday, for a fairly simple task (for every entry in the address book
with both a nickname and a home email address, print out the details in a
specified format). Not only did there not seem to be a consistent way of
checking if a variable was empty (nickname was equal to missing value if it
wasn’t set, but I’m yet to work out how to tell whether there’s an email or
not), but the entire thing became an exercise in “how many different ways are
there of describing what I want to do, using only pidgin[^languagenote]
English?”.
In other news, I’ve (finally) moved into my new place, with Ed and Seth. I’m still moving my stuff up the hill, but the important bits are all there (three computers and a sleeping bag).
[^languagenote]: The language geek in me feels the need to point out that AppleScript is probably actually a creole, not a pidgin; a creole is a pidgin that is actually learned, as opposed to made up as needed
Some useful tips on learning languages.
One thing he suggests is religious texts, which thanks to the zealotry^Wdedication of various groups are usually translated long before other works (especially for obscure languages). I wonder if I can get hold of a copy of the NIV in Norwegian.
Have just been talking to Dan about Java braindamages, specifically converting a list to an array:
FileType[] a = new Filetype[b.size];
a = b.toArray(a);
Compared to the same code in Ruby:
a = b.to_a
(in fact, since arrays and lists are identical in ruby, you don’t even need to do that…)
My “Teach Yourself Norwegian” book arrived from Amazon yesterday. In the short amount of time I’ve been learning, I’ve found it easier to read or write than to speak or listen, which is exactly what I found during seven years of Spanish lessons at school (bloody hell, seven years…).
I’m not certain how different it is from Swedish; I’d quite like to be able to speak both. Then again, there’s a whole list of languages I’d like to be able to speak.