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liam_on_linuxOnce again, recently, I have been told that I simply cannot write about -- for instance -- the comparative virtues of programming languages unless I am a programmer and I can actually program in them. That that is the only way to judge.
This could be the case, yes. I certainly get told it all the time.
But the thing is that I get told it by very smart, very experienced people who also go on to tell me that I am completely wrong about other stuff where I know that I am right, and can produce abundant citations to demonstrate it. All sorts of stuff.
I can also find other people -- just a few -- who know exactly what I am talking about, and agree, and have written much the same, at length. And their experience is the same as mine: years, decades, of very smart highly-experienced people who just do not understand and cannot step outside their preconceptions far enough to get the point.
It is not just me.
I sometimes give parallel examples of human languages. For instance, I am a very poor speaker of 4 or 5 languages with grammatical gender. English lacks grammatical gender (although it has pronoun gender, which some European languages lack).
First-language English speakers who encounter grammatical gender in language learning tend to hate it, and bemoan it as unnecessary and overcomplicated. It seems pointless.
But first-language speakers of languages with grammatical gender have a profoundly different experience. They know that it is useful. For instance, this pair of sentences:
There was a cat and a mat and a mouse. It was on it but it was under it.
In English you cannot unambiguously resolve the second sentence. In many gendered languages, there would be much less ambiguity, and in some, none.
Czech has 4 effective genders, Polish 5 and Russian 6, from my reading so far. Some languages have many more. It might come out as something like "Living-she was on dead-him but living-him was under dead-him" and the listener knows who's on what and who's under what and there's no problem.
If you're a first-language speaker of a non-gendered language, these arguments are a bit abstruse and theoretical, but if you're a first-language speaker of a gendered language, especially for instance a Slavic language with at least 1 and possibly 2 or 3 distinctions between animacy and inanimacy, then there's no problem. Slavic languages also have a complex set of declensions (Czech 7, Russian, Slovak and Polish 6) to modify words according to position and so on. Very complex, a massive pain in my life these days, but nonetheless very useful for native speakers, and for them, really quite easy.
So, to compare, if one only speaks a wide variety of non-gendered languages, it's hard to see any advantage. If explained, it's a theory, but it doesn't seem worth the price.
If you're a fluent, native-level second-language speaker, especially of >1, sure, it's easy and worth it.
If you're a native, it's easy and obvious and clear and languages without it seem perverse. You save a trivial, unimportant bit of effort, but the price is huge.
It goes both ways. Slavic languages lack articles. Czech speakers can see no difference in meaning between these sentences:
What is the time?
What is a time?
What is time?
Explaining the profound difference doesn't work. I've tried.
To Slavic natives, articles are a decorative feature conveying no meaning whatsoever. Beginners omit them, even advanced intermediate speakers throw them in at random and cannot see what difference it makes.
But when I explain that these sentences are effectively opposite in meaning, it rather scares them:
There are few reasons to visit the Czech Republic.
There are a few reasons to visit the Czech Republic.
That gets their attention. But it doesn't help.
It takes many years of study for the most advanced students to get the hang of articles -- we are talking degree-level here. And when they do, they can't explain why and how they work. You need to feel them, people say.
This is of course very unhelpful but that's life.
So when a bunch of very smart programmers write at length and make statements like:
C is deeply and profoundly unsafe, and so is almost everything built on it. Only vast effort by genius-level practitioners can make it safe and this almost never happens.
Other languages do not suffer from these effects. While some of them have achieved small commercial success, they are widely believed not to be practical for, for instance, OS kernel development. However, this is untrue, and this can be demonstrated using certain examples. However the examples are deeply obscure and so do not work for most purposes because, although they are demonstrably viable, practical, useful and were used in some niches, they lack mainstream recognition.
Other languages still offer other profound and important advantages, but they are not well enough known. Sometimes a few people dabble, but not deeply enough to perceive the advantages, so mostly, these languages are dismissed.
There are some languages which have such compelling advantages that, once fully comprehended, they change the practitioner's worldview completely.
Sometimes there are very significant costs or drawbacks to these languages, but with enough effort, these can be overcome. However, in practice, most people either lack the time or the ability or are restricted by external constraints and so cannot explore them.
That all these claims are demonstrable, not theoretical.
That as well as practical constraints, there are also strong cultural ones.
Now, most of these, as bare as that, probably don't seem wildly controversial. I don't know.
But what I can say is that over the last 5-6 years, I have done enough reading and study of this that I am convinced by their truth.
I am still learning, and still trying to find ways to communicate this.
But what I say, what I often post about and talk about, are not wild ideas that I have formulated myself. I am trying to distil what I have learned from other commentators. Mostly, I am failing, apparently. I am still trying to find a way to tell the story in a way that might be more convincing.
But the point is, when you (any many others, here and elsewhere) keep telling me that I don't know what I'm talking about, and that it's my lack of experience talking, it does not dissuade me, because you're shooting the messenger. These are not my ideas. This is not stuff I've made up or come up with. So my lack of experience is immaterial.
I am attempting to convey stuff from people with vastly more experience and knowledge than me.
And I am sorry but their experience and depth of knowledge trumps that of my friends' and my contacts'.
In part, this is what's called the Black Swan theory.
So this is why I am, as far as the participants of cix:linux (and my tech blog) are concerned, I just won't listen to reason. I refuse to be talked out of my foolish ideas.
Because they are not my ideas. They are the result of years of study.
I have seen pictures of black swans. I have found multiple witnesses who have been to Australia and recorded black swans. I've seen stuffed swans.
So it does not matter how much you all tell me that you are swan experts and have travelled all over Eurasia and the Americas and you have seen millions of swans, that you breed swans, that you are world experts in the care and feeding of swans...
If you haven't been to Australia, you don't know. I haven't either, but unlike most people, I've gone looking and talked to people who have and there is no point repeatedly telling me that there are no black swans, because there are, and the reports are valid, and whereas I have not personally been to where black swans live, I have what I think is good, sound, solid evidence that black swans are real.
No, most people have not seen them. They've only seen normal white swans. They might have heard of black ones but they either think it's photoshop or that they've been dyed or painted or something.
And unfortunately, in such a situation, even if I go and get one and plonk it down in front of you, squawking and honking angrily, I think you'll still claim someone just painted it.
So we have a few choices how to proceed.
Either you can take my word for it. I'm happy to provide pointers to my sources; you can go and verify them for yourselves, but yes, it will take some effort. It will take, at the least, hours to days of reading.
Or you can just humour me and take my word for it just for the sake of argument. We could then have some interesting discussions.
Or, of course, you can keep telling me that all swans are white, and I am going to keep smiling back at you and refusing to agree and all you are going to get is angry.
This is not just about Lisp Machines or about computers without auxiliary storage or something.
It's about some bigger general ideas about computing and so on.
I am not asking you to please stop telling me I don't know what I am talking about.
I am asking you to consider that maybe it's not me and it's not me not knowing. That it's just that the real picture is bigger than you realise.
Apply Cromwell's Rule.
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
This could be the case, yes. I certainly get told it all the time.
But the thing is that I get told it by very smart, very experienced people who also go on to tell me that I am completely wrong about other stuff where I know that I am right, and can produce abundant citations to demonstrate it. All sorts of stuff.
I can also find other people -- just a few -- who know exactly what I am talking about, and agree, and have written much the same, at length. And their experience is the same as mine: years, decades, of very smart highly-experienced people who just do not understand and cannot step outside their preconceptions far enough to get the point.
It is not just me.
I sometimes give parallel examples of human languages. For instance, I am a very poor speaker of 4 or 5 languages with grammatical gender. English lacks grammatical gender (although it has pronoun gender, which some European languages lack).
First-language English speakers who encounter grammatical gender in language learning tend to hate it, and bemoan it as unnecessary and overcomplicated. It seems pointless.
But first-language speakers of languages with grammatical gender have a profoundly different experience. They know that it is useful. For instance, this pair of sentences:
There was a cat and a mat and a mouse. It was on it but it was under it.
In English you cannot unambiguously resolve the second sentence. In many gendered languages, there would be much less ambiguity, and in some, none.
Czech has 4 effective genders, Polish 5 and Russian 6, from my reading so far. Some languages have many more. It might come out as something like "Living-she was on dead-him but living-him was under dead-him" and the listener knows who's on what and who's under what and there's no problem.
If you're a first-language speaker of a non-gendered language, these arguments are a bit abstruse and theoretical, but if you're a first-language speaker of a gendered language, especially for instance a Slavic language with at least 1 and possibly 2 or 3 distinctions between animacy and inanimacy, then there's no problem. Slavic languages also have a complex set of declensions (Czech 7, Russian, Slovak and Polish 6) to modify words according to position and so on. Very complex, a massive pain in my life these days, but nonetheless very useful for native speakers, and for them, really quite easy.
So, to compare, if one only speaks a wide variety of non-gendered languages, it's hard to see any advantage. If explained, it's a theory, but it doesn't seem worth the price.
If you're a fluent, native-level second-language speaker, especially of >1, sure, it's easy and worth it.
If you're a native, it's easy and obvious and clear and languages without it seem perverse. You save a trivial, unimportant bit of effort, but the price is huge.
It goes both ways. Slavic languages lack articles. Czech speakers can see no difference in meaning between these sentences:
What is the time?
What is a time?
What is time?
Explaining the profound difference doesn't work. I've tried.
To Slavic natives, articles are a decorative feature conveying no meaning whatsoever. Beginners omit them, even advanced intermediate speakers throw them in at random and cannot see what difference it makes.
But when I explain that these sentences are effectively opposite in meaning, it rather scares them:
There are few reasons to visit the Czech Republic.
There are a few reasons to visit the Czech Republic.
That gets their attention. But it doesn't help.
It takes many years of study for the most advanced students to get the hang of articles -- we are talking degree-level here. And when they do, they can't explain why and how they work. You need to feel them, people say.
This is of course very unhelpful but that's life.
So when a bunch of very smart programmers write at length and make statements like:
C is deeply and profoundly unsafe, and so is almost everything built on it. Only vast effort by genius-level practitioners can make it safe and this almost never happens.
Other languages do not suffer from these effects. While some of them have achieved small commercial success, they are widely believed not to be practical for, for instance, OS kernel development. However, this is untrue, and this can be demonstrated using certain examples. However the examples are deeply obscure and so do not work for most purposes because, although they are demonstrably viable, practical, useful and were used in some niches, they lack mainstream recognition.
Other languages still offer other profound and important advantages, but they are not well enough known. Sometimes a few people dabble, but not deeply enough to perceive the advantages, so mostly, these languages are dismissed.
There are some languages which have such compelling advantages that, once fully comprehended, they change the practitioner's worldview completely.
Sometimes there are very significant costs or drawbacks to these languages, but with enough effort, these can be overcome. However, in practice, most people either lack the time or the ability or are restricted by external constraints and so cannot explore them.
That all these claims are demonstrable, not theoretical.
That as well as practical constraints, there are also strong cultural ones.
Now, most of these, as bare as that, probably don't seem wildly controversial. I don't know.
But what I can say is that over the last 5-6 years, I have done enough reading and study of this that I am convinced by their truth.
I am still learning, and still trying to find ways to communicate this.
But what I say, what I often post about and talk about, are not wild ideas that I have formulated myself. I am trying to distil what I have learned from other commentators. Mostly, I am failing, apparently. I am still trying to find a way to tell the story in a way that might be more convincing.
But the point is, when you (any many others, here and elsewhere) keep telling me that I don't know what I'm talking about, and that it's my lack of experience talking, it does not dissuade me, because you're shooting the messenger. These are not my ideas. This is not stuff I've made up or come up with. So my lack of experience is immaterial.
I am attempting to convey stuff from people with vastly more experience and knowledge than me.
And I am sorry but their experience and depth of knowledge trumps that of my friends' and my contacts'.
In part, this is what's called the Black Swan theory.
So this is why I am, as far as the participants of cix:linux (and my tech blog) are concerned, I just won't listen to reason. I refuse to be talked out of my foolish ideas.
Because they are not my ideas. They are the result of years of study.
I have seen pictures of black swans. I have found multiple witnesses who have been to Australia and recorded black swans. I've seen stuffed swans.
So it does not matter how much you all tell me that you are swan experts and have travelled all over Eurasia and the Americas and you have seen millions of swans, that you breed swans, that you are world experts in the care and feeding of swans...
If you haven't been to Australia, you don't know. I haven't either, but unlike most people, I've gone looking and talked to people who have and there is no point repeatedly telling me that there are no black swans, because there are, and the reports are valid, and whereas I have not personally been to where black swans live, I have what I think is good, sound, solid evidence that black swans are real.
No, most people have not seen them. They've only seen normal white swans. They might have heard of black ones but they either think it's photoshop or that they've been dyed or painted or something.
And unfortunately, in such a situation, even if I go and get one and plonk it down in front of you, squawking and honking angrily, I think you'll still claim someone just painted it.
So we have a few choices how to proceed.
Either you can take my word for it. I'm happy to provide pointers to my sources; you can go and verify them for yourselves, but yes, it will take some effort. It will take, at the least, hours to days of reading.
Or you can just humour me and take my word for it just for the sake of argument. We could then have some interesting discussions.
Or, of course, you can keep telling me that all swans are white, and I am going to keep smiling back at you and refusing to agree and all you are going to get is angry.
This is not just about Lisp Machines or about computers without auxiliary storage or something.
It's about some bigger general ideas about computing and so on.
I am not asking you to please stop telling me I don't know what I am talking about.
I am asking you to consider that maybe it's not me and it's not me not knowing. That it's just that the real picture is bigger than you realise.
Apply Cromwell's Rule.
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
