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May. 9th, 2005 08:00 pmFrom Larry Wall's fairly old speech about Perl:
We mentioned that some complexity is useless, and some is useful. Here's another example of useful complexity.
Now, most of you sitting here are probably prejudiced in favor of western writing systems, and so you think an ideographic writing system is needlessly complex....But again, it's a kind of engineering tradeoff. In this case, the Chinese have traded learnability for portability. Does that sound familiar?
Chinese is not, in fact, a single language. It's about five major languages, any of which are mutually unintelligible. And yet, you can write Chinese in one language and read it in another. Now that's what I call a portable language. By choosing a higher level of abstraction, the Chinese writing system optimizes for communication rather than for simplicity. We have a billion people in China who can't all talk to each other, but at least they can pass notes to each other.
Наблюдение сродни мысли которая у меня где-то там ниже валялась. Только более продуманное и на пять лет раньше, как минимум :)
We mentioned that some complexity is useless, and some is useful. Here's another example of useful complexity.
Now, most of you sitting here are probably prejudiced in favor of western writing systems, and so you think an ideographic writing system is needlessly complex....But again, it's a kind of engineering tradeoff. In this case, the Chinese have traded learnability for portability. Does that sound familiar?
Chinese is not, in fact, a single language. It's about five major languages, any of which are mutually unintelligible. And yet, you can write Chinese in one language and read it in another. Now that's what I call a portable language. By choosing a higher level of abstraction, the Chinese writing system optimizes for communication rather than for simplicity. We have a billion people in China who can't all talk to each other, but at least they can pass notes to each other.
Наблюдение сродни мысли которая у меня где-то там ниже валялась. Только более продуманное и на пять лет раньше, как минимум :)