Re: Another view on analysis and ER

David Cressey wrote:
...
> My mother, who speaks French as a second language, says that French would
> be the best language for science, because it is so precise. Perhaps
> imprecision in English is one of the factors that led to its widespread
> adoption!

My mother was always right too. Seriously, I think you might have something there, when it comes to expressing some kinds of theories, such as what Codd and D&D talk about (all born Englishman). English short-cuts are so dominant, I wonder if this disposes people who learned it first to be more energetic in searching out precise qualifications, whereas the Frenchman might say "Jean a trente trois" is incomplete and nonsensical and leave it at that. No offence to the French, after all their (adopted) Bonaparte who encouraged the decimal system when the English were still stuck on sixes, twelves and twenties, even if the french literals for numbers don't make any more sense than the various English measurement units. But I guess we can never say for sure, since so much of IT is discussed in English, regardless of the language people learned first.

As for inventions or algorithms, eg., innovation, I don't see any bias that makes one nationality or spoken language more productive, seems more to do with economic opportunity and maybe sometimes contrariness, ie., I don't think Codd came up with his ideas because he was born English, but maybe being transplanted helped somehow. Received on Sat Dec 08 2007 - 20:37:37 CET