Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!ucbvax!pasteur!ames!mailrus!nrl-cmf!ukma!psuvm.bitnet!uh2
From: UH2@PSUVM.BITNET (Lee Sailer)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: Cynic's Guide to Software Engineering, part 3
Message-ID: <39501UH2@PSUVM>
Date: 16 Apr 88 15:00:42 GMT
References: <2636@Shasta.STANFORD.EDU> <1950@rtech.UUCP>
Distribution: na
Organization: Penn Sate Erie--School of Business
Lines: 42

In article <1950@rtech.UUCP>, daveb@llama.rtech.UUCP (Crack?  No thanks, I've got a new CD player) says:
>
>In <2636@Shasta.STANFORD.EDU> neff@Shasta.stanford.edu (Randall Neff) writes:
>
>>    Monolingualism:  the Religion and Curse of Software Engineering
>I wonder about the curse of mono-lingualism.  There seem to be few
>complaints about the use of English as the Air Traffic Control language.

   There are LOTS of complaints about air traffic controllers.  Many
AC's only know english as a kind of set of magic spells they chant in
tongue.  (Pilots, too.)


>At some point, won't language hopping make you less able to communicate
>effectively?  Does knowing a smattering of French, German, Japanese,
>Chinese, Swahili and really help you write in English?

Perhaps not, though it certainly helped me.  I knew a little Czech, which
like Russian uses a lot of special markers for the different cases.  It
not only helps my english, but made learning Frame Based AI systems a
snap.

The issue here isn't knowing a smattering, anyway.  Being BILINGUAL certainly
improves a programmers abailty to get the job done.  Knowing PASCAL improved
my on the job programming in FORTRAN.  Knowing SIMULA makes all my
code in non-object oriented languages better.
>
>It is only when the old languages/paradigms become incapable of handling
>a new problem space that it is really necessary to change, and then the
>followers of the old order are in trouble.  It is difficult to say when
>one of these revolutions is happening until it is over.
>
>We have just barely gotten out of the "operating systems are written in
>assembler" mind set.  It is hard for me to believe that, for sake of
>argument, FORTRAN is incapable or even very seriously flawed in its
>ability to model physics problems compared to any of the likely
>alternatives.
>

One of the reasons physicists need super computers is that they usually haven't
a clue about using data structures to implement sophisticated
algorithms.  Most P's do most everything by brute force.  Partly, this
is because FORTRAN makes it so hard to implement clever code.