What makes a language flourish? Or: Why can't I speak Latin? (2021)

https://www.5jt.com/what-makes-a-language-flourish

by tosh • 2 years ago

51 43 2 years ago

I've recently been enchanted by BQN, which "aims to remove irregular and burdensome aspects of the APL tradition, and put the great ideas on a firmer footing":

[1] https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/

BlueTemplar• 2 years ago

Oh, that translation ! Thanks for the laugh.

tempodox2• 2 years ago

Darn, I didn't read that translation because I didn't need it. But it's a nice pun on how anglophones pronounce Latin like it were English.

k__• 2 years ago

As far as I know, nobody is sure how it's pronounced correctly.

I'm German and our teachers always said, Latin is easy to pronounce, just like you would do it in German, but that's just an educated guess.

tosh• 2 years ago

"It is a privilege to learn a language/A journey into the immediate" — Marilyn Hacker

jmclnx• 2 years ago

To me it was the PC as he alluded to. But maybe for a different reason.

When PCs came out, first we had Basic (free) then Pascal and c came along. All were cheap compared to other languages. I do not know about APL, but IIRC, FORTRAN and COBOL both cost over $1000, the others were either free or could be found for under $200.

So, price won the day. I found Zortech c v1 (not c++) for $99 for my 286. That is where I ended up, and compared to Microsoft c I had at work later on, I thought it was just as good and in some cases better (disp_* libs).

When I went to Linux, back then it was c/c++. For some reason at the time, to me it seemed GNU had issues with providing APL and COBOL. I think that was due to academic snobbery. Now we have GNU APL and COBOL, but too little to late.

mlochbaum• 2 years ago

For what it's worth, GNU APL is GNU because the developer chose to associate their project with GNU, not because there was any sort of effort by GNU as an organization to implement APL (see also [0]). It implements what I think is a pretty outdated APL (e.g. dynamic scoping everywhere, no control structures for loops), and I'd say there are better free options now, like Kap and April, and some others listed at [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_GNU_packages#What_it_m...

[1] https://aplwiki.com/wiki/List_of_open-source_array_languages

ghaff3• 2 years ago

DeSmet C was another cheap mostly standard C early on. It was Borland that made Pascal cheap.

I remember being intrigued by APL but, at the time, on PCs, I'm not sure there would have been any reasonable way to run it.

Yes, in general, language tools were very expensive for PC hobbyists in the 80s.

gumby3• 2 years ago

This essay is (perhaps unwittingly) about something important to entrepreneur-nerds (the putative audience for HN), encapsulated in the quote from one Janet Lustgarten:

    Our customers are people for whom
    everything else has failed.

A common trope here for the past few years is “your company doesn’t love you”. Well, your customers don’t either.

Sure, some products can attract a fan base for a while: Evernote. Apple. Certain car companies years ago (or even today). But that simply papers over the real issue which is that people don’t really care about your product, much less you.

I have been intrigued by the phrase “people ‘hire your product’ to get a job done.” They want the hole in the wall, not the drill and bit. So they won’t buy your product unless they have to.

I so often see here (and trust me, I make this mistake all the time myself) of people posting about their product/demo/something cool they wrote and but really only talking about themselves. That only works with the last of those.

al_borland2• 2 years ago

One of the reasons I think Apple has been successful at launching new product categories, where those before them trying to launch the same category have floundered, is they really talk up the problem statement and what the product will do for the user. “1,000 songs in your pocket.” As a consumer, I can understand this, I see the value to my life, and I don’t have to care about what technology was needed to make it possible.

Consistently solve problems for customers (even if the problem was made up) and the company will have fans… until they stop solving the consumer’s problems.

ghaff3• 2 years ago

MP3 players were already a thing. I couldn't actually tell you at this point why I first bought an iPod (my first Apple purchase) with I think the 4th gen click wheel. Presumably it was at a technology point where I felt I should probably get one of these things and Apple seemed the best choice.

gumby3• 2 years ago

The really important lesson from Apple is that they had a cult status in both business and consumer with the Apple II and, in the early days, the Mac. They then lost/squandered it and almost died but astonishingly to all (even to Jobs) were able to recover it via the iPod.

lr4444lr• 2 years ago

People buy newer Apple products without any need, or perhaps even knowledge of the full feature set.

It's part of their identity, and social display.

I think you massively underestimate the power of and need for good marketing.

dasil0032• 2 years ago

The problem to be solved need not be utilitarian, in this case it is status signaling. But note that this is only possible with long-game brand-building, and "good marketing" massively understates what does into achieving this kind of brand positioning. For instance, Apple never would have gotten here is they weren't absolutely obsessed with user experience from day one. The journey from capturing early adopters to mainstream status symbol is not really something that can be planned out, rather it is an emergent phenomenon flowing out of company values that savvy leadership can, at most, capitalize on, but never fully control.

ghaff3• 2 years ago

Eh. I buy a few Apple products and not many others. Ecosystem plays a role as well as, of course, my perception of the functionality of an individual product. I certainly don't have an auto-buy flag for new products as they come out and have never once ordered Day 1.

tehnub• 2 years ago

Just because you buy an Apple product out of desire (perhaps without even knowing the full feature set) does not mean you are buying it for social display. That is one of numerous possible reasons.

golergka2• 2 years ago

If this was the main reason for people to purchase the phone, they would still be buying Nokia Vertu phones instead.

Ma8ee• 2 years ago

Or because they just fucking work without us having to think or spend time on them getting them to do what we want. And no, I don’t care about the “full feature set”. I know it does what I need it to do without any hassle.

zemvpferreira• 2 years ago

That might be true for b2b, but totally wrong for consumer products. Have you never seen someone polish their car on a beautiful sunday, when they could be doing anything else?

Consumers buy most things because they want to, not because they need to. They desperately want to love your product. Unfortunately most products don't deserve to be loved which a whole other matter.

Gare• 2 years ago

They don't love the product, they love how it makes them feel. So your product either has to be addictive or confer status.

victorbjorklund2• 2 years ago

In the jobs to be done framework one would say they still use your product to get a job done. For example, they might get some stress relief from working on their car. That is a job (get stress relief) that is fufilled by the car. Others might solve that with working on a boat, tinkering with a raspberry pi or working on their garden. Then it isnt because they "love" the car but rather they love the stress relief of working on it.

marcosdumay2• 2 years ago

That saying is there because companies are unable to have emotions.

But people are perfectly capable of having them. And while people don't love everything they do, they are perfectly capable of loving you, a product, a store, or anything at all.

So, no, it only applies to your customers if they are companies.

citrin_ru• 2 years ago

They want the hole in the wall, not the drill and bit.

Well, it depends. Some people enjoy using high quality tools and would drill an extra hole because they like the tool.

TaylorAlexander• 2 years ago

“Landlords hate him!”

robocat• 2 years ago

Software engineers and drills and holes in the wall: https://xkcd.com/2021/ https://xkcd.com/905/

senkora• 2 years ago

I have been intrigued by the phrase “people ‘hire your product’ to get a job done.”

Here’s a good article expanding on that point:

https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done

tempodox2• 2 years ago

We language champions are enchanted, enslaved by the beauty we found. But no one else cares.

I feel this way for both natural languages and formal ones (programming languages, algebra). And I still find it hard to get used to the “no one else cares” part, no matter how well I know it to be true.

082349872349872• 2 years ago

You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Belter Creole.

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/bGOFEvpJHIK2ZjPj-5a2tQhTIw...

    GERETERUT: Da Ofiliya im ta du kuxaku sif!
    KELOWDIYUSH: Felota! Da Layeretesh gonya tenye redzherosh.

hobs• 2 years ago

Your client does not have permission to get URL /bGOFEvpJHIK2ZjPj-5a2tQhTIwLAvzBuKm82jy6H3zjedM2FmJcPecdUqi8Osq68X3VlnZwhEd_DyOyDbx6B6ShCDEUp9ubt8Q2n2IIfYKysAueRxYTREZPBVUmK3uG0xQ=w1280 from this server. (Client IP address: redacted)

countWSS• 2 years ago

Elegant, complex and expressive languages aren't easy to read/debug/rewrite. Having a set of special symbols, arcane syntax and complex abstractions isn't a selling point: the purpose of the language to have maintainable and performant software - not to extend the language itself or showcase its strengths. Nobody would "switch to X"/"Rewrite in X", just because X is better, it has to be substantially better for the specific use-case: like a user would not start learning Lojban just because its much better than English, a specific use-case and pragmatic reasons would need to appear where Lojban-as-tool, not Lojban-as-elegant-expression, will clearly outperform English in its domain(e.g. translating concept to some precise neutral representation), and since these use-cases are quite rare, Lojban would not get as much audience despite its rich constructive capabilities in describing concepts.

smokel• 2 years ago

I'm sure it's a combination of mass hysteria and flocking behaviour in humans.

These find their origins in primitive survival techniques: there is safety in numbers, both for raising early alarms, and for protecting against stronger enemies.

I've had great fun with Common Lisp, and I quite liked Scala and recently Kotlin, but professionally I have to make do with Java, TypeScript and Python.

cafard• 2 years ago

I recommend Richard Gabriel's essay "The End of History and the Last Programming Language", which you can find at https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf . The point that stuck with me is "Languages are accepted and evolve by a social process, not a technical or technological one."

But I should add that when he wrote the essay the last programming language was C.

What makes a language flourish? Or: Why can't I speak Latin? (2021)

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