>
> 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).
>
I agree that logic has no language, but any programmer on a computer would
think twice before coding in binary, or even assembly. Unless you are a
hardcore
microcontroller/FPGA level player of machines. Most popular programming
languages
require a minimal knowledge of English before you can begin operating any
computer. This is changing, but only at the level of User Interface.
There is a huge cultural wavefront in place that has also aided the spread
of
English along with technology across the world. But in the East, the notion
of
the 'word' changes drastically. Sanskrit is a language where entire
sentences
can be one word, constructed solely for the purpose of that expression.
String
concatenation has a tremendous meaning in Sanskrit culture. Chinese
and Japanese languages have a pictographic/hieroglyphic quality, more like a
PD
patch that a python script.
Yes, at the heart of programming we are merely manipulating symbols, but
their
relative placement in space is also very important.
>
> 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?
That is exactly the political plateau of the last 300 years I have referred
to.
The Industrial Revolution, WW II etc.
> 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.
I haven't really had the courage for that yet :)
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1/f ))) --.
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http://www.algomantra.com
Received on Fri Jan 11 2008 - 12:44:10 GMT