[Edu-sig] OT - Specialized Language

[Dennis E. Hamilton]

The emergence and preservation of specialized language is an interesting
subject for me.

When I learned to speak pig-Latin in elementary school, we used it to
exclude others from the conversation.  The same when we practiced using
cyphers with each other.

I think you underestimate the value of (4), however.  Just like watching
Roberts Rules be applied in a group activity (a process that many people
think is weird and controlling), you can also see that one of the things it
provides is an assured way to bring a situation to a conclusion while still
providing for due consideration and deliberation.  (Notice that the U.S.
Congress has come up with lots of rules that undermine that, but the
Constitution gives them permission.  You get to say how that works for you
only at the ballot box or by standing for election.)  Robert's Rules are
designed to provide a reliable structure for deliberative processes that
must come to a definite conclusion, avoiding perpetual revisiting of the
same arguments, etc.  It takes people being willing to abide by the process,
even when they think it is a waste of time.

A lot of what happens in a courtroom is structured to get to a conclusion
among individuals who are unable or unwilling to do that themselves (e.g.,
in a civil action).  This means that establishing and preserving the
authority of the court is a very big deal and part of the "language" of it.
The structure of the courtroom gives something that is very important to the
conversations that happen there.  We got to see that in the recent civics
lessons on election processes and how courts are used to resolve disputes
and disagreements.

Don't underestimate the value of playing dress-up!  Or playing any game by
the rules of that game.

It seems to me that specialized language is inevitable, and that means
specialized vocabulary.  We are constantly working to assure that we have a
common vocabulary, yet it would seem that everything about language,
especially our inability to ever be *certain* that we mean the same thing
that the other person does, works toward drift in language usage.

An experiment.  Look at a sport that you like and that you follow closely,
maybe play in.  Look at one that you have no interest in.  Notice how much
alien vocabulary exists among people who are more intimately involved with
the second one.  (Cricket baffles me.  Every tried to explain baseball to
someone from a non-baseball culture?)   Then look at what it is like for
someone who doesn't know about your favorite sport, or has only superficial
interest.  Or consider the language around automobiles or fashion.  Or
cosmetics

	We have a Clinique representative in our household.  That use of
specialized language is all noise to me.  We also have a family member who
is a theater professional.  His relationship to make-up is different than
that of the other two of us, and I still have to ask which is upstage,
downstage, stage left, and stage right.

I am inclined to doubt your lack of facility with vocabulary.  I get that
when you work at acquiring vocabulary, you find that you have trouble with
it.  I bet that you are as masterful at unconsciously, automatically
acquiring vocabulary as you are articulate in e-mail and comfortable with
different programming language structures.

  	When you take on maintaining someone else's program, do you find that you
struggle with the vocabulary of the original authors and their choice of
programming idioms?  I do.  And I am usually good at re-abstracting what is
going on and what the intention for the program is, as part of figuring out
how to maintain it.  If I am in a situation where I can recast the program,
even better.  I can't even leave Knuth's expression of algorithms alone.
Something I have recently begun a self-conscious look at:
http://www.infonuovo.com/orcmid/readings/R010101.htm

I haven't attempted learning another human language since I struggled with
high-school German over 40 years ago.  My wife and I are working at learning
Italian, and not doing too badly.  The two victories were (1) realizing that
I don't even know how I learned English, so believing that learning Italian
should look a particular way and that I was failing if it didn't was
something I had made up; (2) being with that I didn't understand the journey
and simply accepting that if I kept doing the work and stop trying to
understand everything first, I would ultimately acquire Italian.  Exactly
what my instructors have been trying to tell me.  I don't dream in Italian
yet, but I sense that it could happen any day now.

	I can't remember what it was like not to know how to program (after being
at it for 43 years), and I am not sure how I first began to see abstraction
and design in programs.  Or be able to talk about it.

-- Dennis

-- Dennis

AIIM DMware Technical Coordinator
AIIM DMware http://www.infonuovo.com/dmware
ODMA Support http://www.infonuovo.com/odma
------------------
Dennis E. Hamilton            tel. +1-425-793-0283
mailto:orcmid@email.com       fax. +1-425-430-8189

-----Original Message-----
From: edu-sig-admin@python.org [mailto:edu-sig-admin@python.org]On
Behalf Of Morris, Steve
Sent: Wednesday, January 10, 2001 08:09
To: edu-sig@python.org
Subject: RE: [Edu-sig] Natural Language Programming


Hi Art,

 > One last effort -

One last reply. :-)

 [ ... ]

 > [ ... ]Because in the end what we are left with is
 > substanital (though not perfectly - we do go to third and fourth
 > defintions of standard English words) natural language.

 > And vocabulary is about nothing if it is not about communication.

Here is where I disagree or at least disagree with your conclusions.
Language is about communicating in the broad sense. Sometimes the
communication is on many levels and often one of those levels is a level of
exclusion. Vocabulary can be used to say "I am an insider and you are an
outsider." Take legal language for example. This has also evolved by a
process of natural selection, over a number of years. It exists the way it
does (opaque) for several reasons

1) It creates a level of precision.

2) It evolved this way from archaic forms of English.

3) There is resistance to change for fear that the precision will be lost.
If it ain't broke don't fix it.

4) It creates a private club with a language understood only by the
practicioners thus inreasing the value of their skills. It is part of what
sets apart those special people who have "passed the bar."

5) Practicioners are not bothered by the vocabulary once they have entered
the priesthood and have little incentive to change it.

4 is a not inconsiderable issue. There is a lot of legal pomp and
circumstance that is intended merely to emphasize the importance and
solemnity of the occasion and to create respect for the process.  There no
legal reason that the judge needs to sit on his high bench. The bench
represents his authority. "All rise." Why the heck should we rise when the
judge enters. These proceedures and the language of the law in general exist
at least partially to reduce communication. The entire legal process is an
excercise in controlled communication (ie limiting communication.) Many
things are not allowed to be said in the courtroom, Perry Mason to the
contrary. In other words the language of the law is about limiting
communication.

And how about music. Music notation is a kludge. Only music in the key of C
makes sense. Sharps and flats are repairs to the defective system. In a
properly designed music notation system intervals (the relationship between
notes) would be implicit in the notation. Music is interval and timing. An
octave should leap out at you just from the notation. A fifth should shout
its existance. Music notation was designed for playing, not composition or
analysis. The structure of music (what sounds interesting and why) is highly
mathematical. I defy anyone to see the mathematics in music notation. The
closely held secret of music theory is that it is simple. It is only the
language that is more opaque than it could be.

There's many a potential talented musician who couldn't learn to read music.
Is the defect in them or the notation? I suggest that it is the notation,
hundreds of years of acceptance or not. An M4E program would have to address
this.

Just because there is an accepted vocabulary doesn't mean that it is easy to
learn or that there aren't better alternatitives. What we have here is what
economists call lock in. (VCS vs. Beta is the classic example.) Current
practice is often far from best known practice. This is true of any
evolutionary system. Why this happens is a large, well studied subject that
I don't want to go into to deeply here but I'll make a simple pass.
Physicists think of these as local minima. A marble rolling down a hill
doesn't always reach the lowest point in spite of the driving force of
gravity. The path is critical. Local dips in the terrain grab it and prevent
it from going lower. The same is true of the evolution of vocabulary.

 > I have a simple premise.  If something is easy for me to
 > comprehend, it
 > is easy for the next guy.  I am not sure who I would be if I thought
 > otherwise.
 > Not someone I would like very much.

Strange premise. There are things that are easy for you that are hard for
me. This is a simple fact and no insult. I am baffled as to why you would
dislike yourself for acknowledging this simple fact.

 > By calling the next guy stupid, you're calling me stupid
 > because in some
 > other area of endeavor I am going to be the novice. And I am not even
 > going to have the opportunity to tell you - "translate",
 > "move" - got it,
 > next.

Since you like being personal in these discussions let me offer myself as
one of several examples. Perhaps this personification will make my point
clearer to you. I do not consider myself stupid even though my ability to
acquire vocabulary is limited. I have strengths that I quite immodestly
think are more important and make me a quite capapable person. We all have
different blends of strengths and weaknesses. The world would be boring if
this were not true.

People come in all shapes and sizes and capapabilities. For some, new
vocabularies are a snap. My father in law was an amazing amateur linguist.
He was fluent in 5 languages and did technical translation in 20 more. If he
new the subject he could translate in languages he had never seen before as
long as it shared common roots with one or more of the languages he did
know. (He claimed that most technical words are the same in all languages
anyway.) If he wanted to read something he could pick up a working
capability for a language in a few weeks. He didn't work hard at this. It
came naturally to him. I think the real key to his success was an almost
eidetic memory for vocabulary. He had it in large measure. I have it almost
not at all. You are probably somewhere in the middle. CP4E needs to address
people at my end of the scale. It is an insult to no one to say that my
vocabulary learning skills are less than yours. It is a simple fact. My
proceedural memory and skills just might be better than yours. They
certainly have helped me compensate. I test high in langauge skills because
my comprehension of grammer and syntax is high. In spite of that I have
never been able to learn other verbal languages because I can't get over the
vocabulary hurdle. I have tried again and again. On the other hand I know
over 20 programming languages, maybe as many as 30 (it's hard to count
because I keep forgetting about the ones I rarely use.) There are generally
fewer than 10 key words (basic vocabularly) in programming languages. These
are langueages with high syntatic and grammatical content but are almost
vocabulary free. So I'm a great programmer but a lousy linguist.

I am suggesting very simply and personally that "translate" instead of
"move" (and similar words) could have been a barrier to me. By refusing to
acknowledge this difference between people you would eliminate people with
my strengths and weaknesses from the people you would recruit into a CP4E
type effort. Just because you don't have a problem with vocabulary doesn't
mean no one else does. It is no insult to me to say so.

Special vocabularies are not a barrier to everyone but they are a barrier to
some. I am one. Your insistance that my abilities are the same as yours is
exclusionary. You deal with my weaknesses by denying that they exist and
thus don't help me work around them. That's like saying we should design
programs only for the rich because everyone has the same ability to acquire
money.

I obviously don't mean me personally. I have successfully compensated for my
problems with vocabulary, partially by my choice of careers. I over
compensate perhaps in working on acquiring and using English vocablary.
However CP4E, if the E means anything, should include people to whom
vocabulary is a barrier. I assure you that there are more of us than you
might think.  CP4E (in the broad sense, not just Guido's grant projects)
should be about identifying barriers to entry and addressing them.
Programming is clearly something that anyone can learn. They don't largely
because of various barriers to entry.

The correct way to handle this particular barrier is probably with
transitional vocabularies (perhaps simple aliases to the less 'naturally'
named commands) just the way kindergarden uses transitional spelling
stratagies to teach spelling. If you are going to teach 3d programming,
eventually the student needs to know the standard vocabulary or they can't
benefit from the current body of knowledge. That is no reason to say they
shouldn't be allowed into the temple of 3D learning with out jumping this
vocabulary hurdle first.

I think the heat you see on this subject is from people like me, to whom
specialized vocabulary IS a barrier, taking personally your suggestion that
our problem doesn't exist or deserve to be addressed. CP4E doesn't mean CP4
everyone whose learning abilities exactly match Arthur Siegel's.

Regards,

Steve Morris

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