[Edu-sig] More news from Oregon

[kirby urner]

On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 8:37 PM, Steve Howell <showell30 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Kirby, thanks for the updates.  Below are the statements that were most
> throught-provoking to me.  See my reactions.
>
>
> --- On Thu, 9/25/08, kirby urner <kirby.urner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Computer programming languages are "disruptive
> > technology" pure and
> > simple, and there's no easy way to phase them in to
> > high school mathematics
> > classes without breaking backward compatibility in some
> > ways, duh.
>
> I totally agree with that.  I also wonder how there can be convergences
> between how we teach computer languages (Python, Javascript, etc.) and
> natural languages (French, Spanish, etc.).


Yes.  I typically bring up J (the language) and the LEX Institute at this
point, the former because the documentation consciously adopts "grammar" and
"parts of speech" as the dominant paradigm, the latter because here you have
human language learners (pioneers in techniques) tackling Fourier
Transformations as a topic.  O'Reilly's 'Head First' titles reminds me of
LEX, per this blog post:


>
>
>
> > Anyway, the long and short of it is I'm still working
> > with that charter in
> > Alaska I mentioned in my Chicago talk, hammering on ASCII -
> > to - Unicode as
> > a "major story of our time" don't care what
> > class it's taught in
> > (sociology?  anthropology?). [...]
>
> I agree with you that Unicode's a big story.  I just wonder if fifty years
> from now, we'll all be wondering how people ever survived without a single
> small alphabet that we can all agree on.  In fact, I'm wondering how many
> people will be left in the world that can't read and write (a somewhat
> evolved version of) English (in addition to their native languages).
>
>
Having lived in the Philippines, I recognize the importance of a lingua
franca, be that English or whatever and expect we'll continue to see "glue
language" sinews keeping us globalizing productively.  Romanji or Latin-1
definitely did us a big favor in being small and compact, running in < 1K
one might say.  Mnemonics like JMP and CMD, short words like "hex", are
likely to stick around for the foreseeable future.  But yeah, reams of
source code in Cyrillic and Greek are already happening at higher levels
than assembler, would be my educated guess, and our open source repositories
will be reflecting those freedoms.

Kirby
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