That's because English requires a significant amount of mutual information and experience between parties, which the computer lacks. Hell, look at all the native English speakers who have trouble communicating. When I write to you in English I'm directing you toward something you essentially know already. It would be faster to raise a child to be a programmer when he or she grows up.
Kevin Barry

Working on an A_Famous_Chip I once proclaimed: "Let's make the chip hot by making it cool" - that occasion was related to reducing power consumption ...

Well, you really should try German, much worse.

Nbomr had it wrong to begin with: English has a 30000 rules, and a million
exceptions ;}

German is much cleaner/clearer, and far less ambiguous in many cases.



Cheers,
Tink

I would say the same the other way around. Seems to be so that native speakers have the most problems with their language.

What if I told you that my German is far better than my English?


;}


Cheers,
Tink

http://www.cognitivelinguistics.org/cl.shtml
Kevin Barry

Yes -- native German speakers have told me that almost no Germans speak German properly. But it may differ from English in having formal rules which mean there is a proper way to speak it -- if you learn all the rules and can be bothered -- whereas English is not fully covered by rules.

Hello,

the problem with German are not the rules but the exceptions from the rules. When we learn another language we are often told that we should be happy that we don't have to learn German. I understand that for example the English grammar is much simpler than the German grammar.

But in my opinion one of the problems of the English language is that most people who use it are no natives whereas amongst the people using the German language there are more natives (for example in the internet). This results in a lower quality of the English used in public.

btw, I've read some English books, not only about computers but also for example James Joyce. And in good books there one finds an excellent English compared with the English mostly found in the internet.

Markus

Interesting read; didn't quite get how it related to my "rules & exceptions"
statement, though.

The rules and exceptions you discuss are so "complicated" because they're the wrong focus when studying a language.
Kevin Barry

Honestly, I loved programming in COBOL and CL on the AS/400

Any time someone invents their own command language for a product it's the worst thing ever.

Except when they try to extend their half-finished, irregular, no error handling having, spiteful, evil piece of software - because that usually winds up being even worse.

You're not talking about Unix and C, are you?
Kevin Barry

Hah. No my real ire is reserved for every network equipment vendor who saw cisco ios and said "I want to do that, but poorly". Or every software vendor who every got shell envy and made up a language to control their software, only they don't bother to apply any of the lessons learned in the last 40 or so years that shells have been developed.

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