On Oct 21, 11:36 am, Ben Finney <ben+pyt...@benfinney.id.au> wrote: > rusi <rustompm...@gmail.com> writes: > > The American programmer would profit more from learning Latin than > > from learning yet another programming language. > > > Edsger Dijkstra in "On the fact that the Atlantic Ocean has two > > sides" > > >http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD611.html > > It's ambiguous whether Dijkstra is saying anything positive about Latin > there. > > He could be saying “learning Latin would be a useful thing for average > US programmers”. > > Or he could be saying “learning any second natural human language – even > one as useless as Latin – will benefit the average US programmer more > than learning another programming language”. > > I prefer to think someone as wise as Dijkstra would not be deluded as to > the value of Latin, and lean more toward the latter meaning.
Well if you see the additional lines Chris has added or other personal correspondences of EWD eg http://digitalundivide.blogspot.com/2005/12/ewd-personal-reflection.html Dijkstra clearly has a specific choice of latin. It is easier to discount your view -- Dijkstra is wise -- than to deny that Dijkstra was a devoted classicist -- music, languages and ultimately programming. And much bigger CSists than you and I -- eg Egon Borger, R W Hamming etc -- have called Dijkstra a nut. It seems to me that Dijkstra's quote would become a bit more meaningful if one went up, so to speak, the class hierarchy. He is talking of 3 languages -- English, Latin and ones native tongue. Generalizing (with slight inaccuracy) one could list 3 categories: a communication language b sacred/classical language c mother tongue Today a is singleton -- {English} b is roughly {sanskrit, hebrew, arabic, latin, greek} Each of these categories has a very different function just as Bach and beatles have different functions. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list