Hacker News Reader

Comment by rolltiide | Hacker News Reader

I’d go just to learn the latin

Would definitely fill in the pieces from some of my own study of law

A couple undergraduate classics courses would be far cheaper and much more useful in that regard. On a similar note, studying Greek and Latin in college gave me a large leg up in other areas of study (e.g. I had a much greater mastery of English and writing, programming language syntax was far easier to learn, etc.). Classical languages are far more useful than people realize.

How's Greek and Latin related to programming language syntax?

I studied Latin and to me it’s the syntax that’s interesting and useful for this career. Subject-object-verb structure, and the words change depending on their usage (declension/conjugation). Picking apart a sentence in a foreign language and making sense of the structure is a lot like programming so it’s a transferable skill

"Picking apart a sentence in a foreign language and making sense of the structure is a lot like programming so it’s a transferable skill"

... yeah no those are nothing alike at all...

Debugging, then. I don’t know. Your mileage may vary.

Key ideas in computer science, such as for instance Chomsky grammars, are derived directly from linguistics.

I don't think it's fair to say that approaching a foreign language has nothing to do with approaching a new programming language.

Let's suppose I buy into this idea. Is studying German or other modern language any less useful?

I don’t think so. It’s not about the particular language, just studying the structure and figuring out the rules. It’s good practice. Latin is interesting because it’s a root for so many languages and in particular English

For me it would be less useful due to the similarity(e.g. I had little to no difficulty learning Spanish as a native English speaker. Sure, there were differences, but the similarities allowed me to focus on and pick up the difference more quickly without being overwhelmed). It would be like going from Java to C#. Some differences, but very few because the base is so similar.

I should have specified it was learning Koine Greek that helped (Latin was somewhat of a bridge that made it less painful, because Latin also relies heavily on declension/conjugation instead of straight word order). Koine Greek is wildly different than English. I think it would be the difference between something like going from an OOP language to something like Prolog.

OK but you can do all that in your native language also. It's called grammar and rhetoric, part of the language arts, taught in schools worldwide.

Sure you can. You can add flavour with other languages, too. For example, I only really learned about the subjunctive mood after learning it in French, which uses it much more distinctly than in English.

Indirect relation. It forced me to think differently about language and syntax in general. For example, English (and many other languages) relies on a word order typology. Greek relies on inflection and declension over word order, which is wildly different.

Between taking a term in statistics/law 101/ and learning Greek I would always go for the first group.

I am trilingual, but I have never found anything in natural languages to be useful for programming (well, apart from knowing English because most of the software is written in it). Moreover - learning syntax of a programming language is the easiest part.

The hardest part for natural languages are your vocab/familiarity with the culture, and the hardest part of programming languages is your familiarity with the ecosystem/libraries.

Same, trilingual as well.

There have been studies that show children with a bilingual upbringing tend to score higher in school.

So it might indirectly help with programming, or at least help with learning to program.

I took a latin class in uni.

I think it did help a bit because it made me think about the syntactic structure intellectually, where my native tounge the syntax comes intuitively.

Not saying it magically made me a super programmer or anything, but i feel like it certainly didnt hurt my programming skill.

It's so annoying when they use latin for the sake of latin. My brain automatically translates "inter alia" to "among other things", but why not just say "among other things"?

I get it if there just isn't an English equivalent for a phrase, but when there is, and it fits 100%, it should be unacceptable to use anything else.

Maybe most commonly used language patterns can carry other connotations therefore bring in ambiguities. Bringing in special terms that are not otherwise used would reduce arguments over the usage. But in all likelihood it is probably just tradition, and a barrier of entry that insiders are happy to maintain.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com