> On 11 Jan 2008, at 11:57, AlgoMantra wrote:
>
>> Computers are cultural artifacts too - the use of the English
>> alphabet is almost ubiquitous
>> in computing. It is hardwired and encoded, burned into the very
>> heart of the device.
>
> Can you qualify that a little more? I'm intrigued, surely at the very
> heart of the device is binary representation and boolean logic, and
> not much more? As programmers we are more aware of this functionality
> than the words we use to describe them (eg. MOD and % are both easily
> understood and could be exchanged fairly easily in many languages).
>
> Surely the enormous popularity of ANSI and ASCII to represent the
> English alphabet (and not much else) is a symptom of the countries
> that have driven (exploited?) the major changes in technology at
> crucial times?
>
> FWIW, I'd love to be able to forget what the first letters of ANSI and
> ASCII stood for. I really do prefer Unicode at all levels: name,
> objectives, implementation. A livecoding language using some of the
> more interesting Unicode pages would be great.
It's fashionable in scheme to use λ instead of lambda.
There are some Russian programming languages around:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapira
Some of the languages and machines developed for the Soviet space program
are also interesting, coming from a different cultural time and place to
most other technology, but there are very few details online.
It seems so clear to us that we can escape it, but it usually turns out
(with hindsight) that everything we produce contains our cultural leaning,
I wouldn't expect programming and the architecture of computing machines
is exempt from that bias either. RISC vs CISC and micro kernels vs
monolithic kernels? :)
I would expect the xxxxx people would have something to say about this.
cheers,
dave
Received on Fri Jan 11 2008 - 13:41:39 GMT