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The Language of Programming • Anjana Vakil • GOTO 2019
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 3 ส.ค. 2024
- This presentation was recorded at GOTO Chicago 2019. #gotocon #gotochgo
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Anjana Vakil - Engineering Learning & Development Lead at Mapbox
ABSTRACT
Humans use language to communicate with one another; humans use programming to communicate with machines (or do they?). In this talk we’ll look at the practice and culture of programming from the perspective of linguistics, the scientific study of the form, meaning, and function of language. We’ll explore what lessons we as programmers can learn from subfields as varied as grammar theory, language acquisition, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics.
Code is language, language is collaboration, collaboration is power. We should consider code through the same cultural and cognitive [...]
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Always love her talks. Anjana always brings a new perspective to existing questions.
Just for the record, Dijkstra also won the Turing award and although he is pretty famous in the engineering community for having created the Shortest Path algorithm in a graph, his most significant work was on the creation of Structured Programming which was a way of creating cleaner programming flows. Funfact , the name of these conferences derives from the main target of his critique, the GOTO statement, which was the main responsible for what it is called spaghetti code. I guess, saying "bad Dijkstra" is kind of saying "bad Newton", also known for his grumpiness, and if he was still alive today, software would probably live up to the hardware it runs on. Even with a couple objections in the middle, I must say I enjoyed this talk a lot, for the freshness of the idea it presents.
Nice talk. Fascinating topic. Historian Yuval Harari's perspective on the rise of sapiens came to mind with this topic. "Harari proposes one interpretation of the history of humankind, in which he insists that Homo sapiens have created civilizations by means of language. According to him, sapiens got language, which enabled them to make fictions such as money, state, or human rights. Furthermore, believing in fiction has enabled sapiens to cooperate in large numbers. As a result, sapiens, unlike other animals, were able to create civilizations. In short, Harari insists that language has made sapiens what we are now."
"what even is code, maaan" lol
I love her way of explaining things!
An underrated talk, imo!
Damn, brogrammers will really ignore the content of an hour-long lecture and collectively jump on ONE (1) thing she said that may or may not be flawed. Get a thicker skin guys, it'll help you in the long run ;)
Surprisingly good lecture. I expected little after first few sentences, but in the end was a pleasure to listen
Teaching of programming for total novice using language... I don't know whether it is right approach but it helpful for me.
if nothing else, she has proved that programmers are quite easily offended by minor critiques of the way their language can negatively affect people lol.
YES!
40:45 Coding in Arabic surely does lift the cognitive load of having to learn coding **and** English, but it hinders collaboration with non-Arabic speakers.
I can imagine these languages being relegated to beginner's programming languages, I wonder if there are some "serious" applications being developed in them.
I think it's important to consider cultural biases and how words and phrases are received. Things like black-/whitelist or master/slave are perfectly reasonable to replace. But I think where the line of disagreement is whether the receiver should have the absolute right of interpretation, or should be expected to not deliberately put an unfavorable or unfair interpretation. What about words that are ordinary and appropriate in one language but extremely offensive in another, such as the reader's? (not the translated word, but the actual on the page word).
In general there are probably unconsidered uses of words, with absolutely no harm to anyone intended. Then there is the right of the creator to express him/her self, perhaps unnecessarily, with opinions. As in other cases of speech the limits are the same in code or technology related texts.
At some point there is either an legal issue, or an ethical one that just let people evaluate the creator.
Words are most obviously not actions btw.
"If we're going to teach programming... we have to be aware of something that has nothing to do with it. "
-Ramsey Nasser, Creator of WTF??
🤣🤣
Funny that she talks about globally sharing & collaborating without the culture bias in the languages,
and yet when she could've said "right away", she instead said "right of the bat", so I had to go search what this idiom means, to find out that it's only an American idiom that came from baseball -which is also an American sport-.
It really takes an effort to totally be culturally unbiased when using the languages, even when you are not a native speaker.
also i guess she is india origin but the way she pronounce her name 'Vakil' like 'Vyakil' made me laugh :D
@@q-randomness975 Indians are always intelligent she showed this through her lecture🇮🇳🇮🇳
Please stop using human words in your programs altogether. Just use strings of bits to identify things that are the same and things that are different. Ideally use random sequences so that you can have lots that won't collide and noone tries to derive meaning from them. (Basically, write only machine code with huge instruction identifiers). You can then still use the human words in your documentation and as mnemonics that your editor shows and whatnot, and change those if cultural context demands it. But don't make me code my system to interact with yours using human language. I don't want to change my program because your company changed its name or because the default branch is now called main rather than master. Add a level of indirection, so that the program for the machine doesn't have so many ties to the human language. This small change will save us from all renaming and service locating refactorings and let's us focus on the structural and semantic ones.
You gotta be kidding! This is obsurd! To refactor all code in order to not offend!
1 st view :)
Your brain drives my hormones crazzzyyy lol 😆 I need to get out of this house lol
language cant evolve...
Resumen del vídeo: «presta atención a cómo te expresas con tu programación o te denunciaré por xenófobo/racista. Tú verás». Es increíble ver cómo esta mujer no es capaz de distinguir los conceptos de positividad/negatividad de "white" y "black", de las connotaciones racistas de hace un siglo (medio siglo en los EEUU). Como decimos en español: «¿Qué tiene que ver el tocino con la velocidad?».
Gracias por tus sabias palabras.
Video summary: «Pay attention to how you express yourself with your programming or I will denounce you as xenophobic / racist. You will see". It is amazing to see how this woman is not able to distinguish the concepts of positivity / negativity of "white" and "black" from the racist connotations of a century ago (half a century in the US). As we say in Spanish: "What does bacon have to do with speed?" (Google translate)
"Linguistics shouldn't be prescriptive"
"...but don't say 'blacklist'."
There, I just saved you 52 minutes.
I can't decided whether this is an example of hearing comprehension failure or just motivated reasoning.
The way around this tension between ideas is to notice that she isn't telling programmers that they should become linguists who view language from a value free point of view. She is telling us to use language which doesn't offend, hurt or trigger anyone while reminding that we can't treat code as something separate from for example politics, racial and other cultural issues. Of course offense is something that's taken, not given, and it's in practice impossible to make sure that no one can associate anything negative with your code and documentation, but that's okay, because everyone should understand that we all make mistakes, no one is perfect and that the most toxic thing of all is not forgiving and not forgetting instead of accepting an apology and moving on. It's not like it's "one strike and you're out permanently, and we'll make sure you'll never work anywhere ever again." This ain't a cult after all but just normal good and polite manners and professional conduct which includes understanding that we're all just human.
"linguistics shouldn't be prescriptive" is a statement regarding which syntactic/semantic usage of language is "technically correct", not a value judgment about whether certain language is insensitive or biased (intentionally or otherwise). so for example, you can say "ain't is okay to say" and "using culturally and historically charged language can be insensitive" without being a hypocrite -- and if that's truly an implication you're going to make, i would question if you're even entering the conversation in good faith.
@@nyrtzi does not offend or trigger anyone? How is that possible? People are being triggered from "blacklist" for gods sake!
@@masterbedroom594 It is true that we nowadays seem to be in the age of where other people have authority over what you meant with what you said and those fixated on some things will always find their pet peeves in what one says.
'10:42 "most of the languages don't make a distinction between genders. Looks like that's a mostly Western phenomenon." So!?!?! What's wrong with the West? And English is the international language of business. Sorry to all the social justice warriors. (plus many of those 254 languages are barely spoken)
I think she said it tongue in cheek. The West is always preaching about gender equality while having a fundamental linguistic distinction.