What makes a language flourish? Or: Why can't I speak Latin? (2021) | Hacker News Reader

What makes a language flourish? Or: Why can't I speak Latin? (2021)

5jt.com

51 pointstosh43 comments

This essay is (perhaps unwittingly) about something important to entrepreneur-nerds (the putative audience for HN), encapsulated in the quote from one Janet Lustgarten:

    Our customers are people for whom
    everything else has failed.

A common trope here for the past few years is “your company doesn’t love you”. Well, your customers don’t either.

Sure, some products can attract a fan base for a while: Evernote. Apple. Certain car companies years ago (or even today). But that simply papers over the real issue which is that people don’t really care about your product, much less you.

I have been intrigued by the phrase “people ‘hire your product’ to get a job done.” They want the hole in the wall, not the drill and bit. So they won’t buy your product unless they have to.

I so often see here (and trust me, I make this mistake all the time myself) of people posting about their product/demo/something cool they wrote and but really only talking about themselves. That only works with the last of those.

That might be true for b2b, but totally wrong for consumer products. Have you never seen someone polish their car on a beautiful sunday, when they could be doing anything else?

Consumers buy most things because they want to, not because they need to. They desperately want to love your product. Unfortunately most products don't deserve to be loved which a whole other matter.

They don't love the product, they love how it makes them feel. So your product either has to be addictive or confer status.

In the jobs to be done framework one would say they still use your product to get a job done. For example, they might get some stress relief from working on their car. That is a job (get stress relief) that is fufilled by the car. Others might solve that with working on a boat, tinkering with a raspberry pi or working on their garden. Then it isnt because they "love" the car but rather they love the stress relief of working on it.

(This is just an example of if the reason they wash their car is because they destress that way. If it is because a clean car makes them feel pride you can apply the same process. Perhaps fancy clothes or a fancy watch fufills the same desire etc)

One of the reasons I think Apple has been successful at launching new product categories, where those before them trying to launch the same category have floundered, is they really talk up the problem statement and what the product will do for the user. “1,000 songs in your pocket.” As a consumer, I can understand this, I see the value to my life, and I don’t have to care about what technology was needed to make it possible.

Consistently solve problems for customers (even if the problem was made up) and the company will have fans… until they stop solving the consumer’s problems.

The really important lesson from Apple is that they had a cult status in both business and consumer with the Apple II and, in the early days, the Mac. They then lost/squandered it and almost died but astonishingly to all (even to Jobs) were able to recover it via the iPod.

MP3 players were already a thing. I couldn't actually tell you at this point why I first bought an iPod (my first Apple purchase) with I think the 4th gen click wheel. Presumably it was at a technology point where I felt I should probably get one of these things and Apple seemed the best choice.

Well the popular story goes that mp3 players were a thing but either had very little flash storage, or had a big bulky hard drive and terrible battery life. Then iPod came out with a newly developed tiny hard drive, plus a flash buffer so it would only have to spin up the hd every 20 minutes, plus a good control scheme plus a fast port for transferring files plus iTunes which was supposedly better than the competing software options. Though I can't personally verify all that, since I never had an early mp3 player

I've had an iRiver h340 mp3 player with 40gb hard drive, not that different from what iPod offered. But when I got an iPod instead, it just felt so much better, even compared to the custom firmware like Rockbox. Same tech specs, but a vastly superior product — a very common thing that I've seen repeated with many other Apple products, like a Nokia 6600 vs first iPhone just a couple of years later.

This is right, but it doesn't support what the GGP said.

Apple have not historically created new product categories. They have turned fledgling product categories with weird and untried technology into popular and mature ones.

The MP3 player, the smartphone, the tablet, the PC, the computer-in-monitor are all examples of these.

This is why I have this line in my comment.

>those before them trying to launch the same category have floundered

Yes, the mp3 player existed, but they either held only a few songs in your pocket, like the Diamond Rio. Or they held a lot, but looked like a Discman for some reason, like the Creative Nomad Jukebox.

The iPod was the best of both worlds, and the iTunes enabled the user to take the library that they managed and curated on their desktop, and mirror it to the iPod. It’s very easy and elegant.

This took the mp3 player from a thing for nerds and some college students who really liked Napster, and made it mainstream. MP3 players went from some products, to a category with a whole industry around it… accessories, repair shops, etc.

> They want the hole in the wall, not the drill and bit.

Well, it depends. Some people enjoy using high quality tools and would drill an extra hole because they like the tool.

Software engineers and drills and holes in the wall: https://xkcd.com/2021/ https://xkcd.com/905/

“Landlords hate him!”

> I have been intrigued by the phrase “people ‘hire your product’ to get a job done.”

Here’s a good article expanding on that point:

https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done

That saying is there because companies are unable to have emotions.

But people are perfectly capable of having them. And while people don't love everything they do, they are perfectly capable of loving you, a product, a store, or anything at all.

So, no, it only applies to your customers if they are companies.

People buy newer Apple products without any need, or perhaps even knowledge of the full feature set.

It's part of their identity, and social display.

I think you massively underestimate the power of and need for good marketing.

The problem to be solved need not be utilitarian, in this case it is status signaling. But note that this is only possible with long-game brand-building, and "good marketing" massively understates what does into achieving this kind of brand positioning. For instance, Apple never would have gotten here is they weren't absolutely obsessed with user experience from day one. The journey from capturing early adopters to mainstream status symbol is not really something that can be planned out, rather it is an emergent phenomenon flowing out of company values that savvy leadership can, at most, capitalize on, but never fully control.

I think tech people vastly overstate how much Apple devices are status symbols to the average consumer.

Most non tech adults I know buy them as low effort ie just works devices. The perception isn’t that they are great just that the other options are worse. It’s a combination of useful defaults, reasonable UI, and few gotchas like a short lifespan or poor battery life. Most of them had multiple phones before the iPhone, but ran into various issues.

Agreed, but I'm just responding to the GPs point, not making a statistical argument about how many people see it as a status symbol (and what subset of those would publicly admit it).

I’m pretty much all in on Apple because they generally suck less, not out of any great enthusiasm.

For certain things I prefer Linux and don’t use Apple.

Or because they just fucking work without us having to think or spend time on them getting them to do what we want. And no, I don’t care about the “full feature set”. I know it does what I need it to do without any hassle.

Just because you buy an Apple product out of desire (perhaps without even knowing the full feature set) does not mean you are buying it for social display. That is one of numerous possible reasons.

If this was the main reason for people to purchase the phone, they would still be buying Nokia Vertu phones instead.

Eh. I buy a few Apple products and not many others. Ecosystem plays a role as well as, of course, my perception of the functionality of an individual product. I certainly don't have an auto-buy flag for new products as they come out and have never once ordered Day 1.

Elegant, complex and expressive languages aren't easy to read/debug/rewrite. Having a set of special symbols, arcane syntax and complex abstractions isn't a selling point: the purpose of the language to have maintainable and performant software - not to extend the language itself or showcase its strengths. Nobody would "switch to X"/"Rewrite in X", just because X is better, it has to be substantially better for the specific use-case: like a user would not start learning Lojban just because its much better than English, a specific use-case and pragmatic reasons would need to appear where Lojban-as-tool, not Lojban-as-elegant-expression, will clearly outperform English in its domain(e.g. translating concept to some precise neutral representation), and since these use-cases are quite rare, Lojban would not get as much audience despite its rich constructive capabilities in describing concepts.

To me it was the PC as he alluded to. But maybe for a different reason.

When PCs came out, first we had Basic (free) then Pascal and c came along. All were cheap compared to other languages. I do not know about APL, but IIRC, FORTRAN and COBOL both cost over $1000, the others were either free or could be found for under $200.

So, price won the day. I found Zortech c v1 (not c++) for $99 for my 286. That is where I ended up, and compared to Microsoft c I had at work later on, I thought it was just as good and in some cases better (disp_* libs).

When I went to Linux, back then it was c/c++. For some reason at the time, to me it seemed GNU had issues with providing APL and COBOL. I think that was due to academic snobbery. Now we have GNU APL and COBOL, but too little to late.

For what it's worth, GNU APL is GNU because the developer chose to associate their project with GNU, not because there was any sort of effort by GNU as an organization to implement APL (see also [0]). It implements what I think is a pretty outdated APL (e.g. dynamic scoping everywhere, no control structures for loops), and I'd say there are better free options now, like Kap and April, and some others listed at [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_GNU_packages#What_it_m...

[1] https://aplwiki.com/wiki/List_of_open-source_array_languages

DeSmet C was another cheap mostly standard C early on. It was Borland that made Pascal cheap.

I remember being intrigued by APL but, at the time, on PCs, I'm not sure there would have been any reasonable way to run it.

Yes, in general, language tools were very expensive for PC hobbyists in the 80s.

I've recently been enchanted by BQN, which "aims to remove irregular and burdensome aspects of the APL tradition, and put the great ideas on a firmer footing":

[1] https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/

> We language champions are enchanted, enslaved by the beauty we found. But no one else cares.

I feel this way for both natural languages and formal ones (programming languages, algebra). And I still find it hard to get used to the “no one else cares” part, no matter how well I know it to be true.

You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Belter Creole.

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/bGOFEvpJHIK2ZjPj-5a2tQhTIw...

    GERETERUT: Da Ofiliya im ta du kuxaku sif!
    KELOWDIYUSH: Felota! Da Layeretesh gonya tenye redzherosh.

Your client does not have permission to get URL /bGOFEvpJHIK2ZjPj-5a2tQhTIwLAvzBuKm82jy6H3zjedM2FmJcPecdUqi8Osq68X3VlnZwhEd_DyOyDbx6B6ShCDEUp9ubt8Q2n2IIfYKysAueRxYTREZPBVUmK3uG0xQ=w1280 from this server. (Client IP address: redacted)

"It is a privilege to learn a language/A journey into the immediate" — Marilyn Hacker

I recommend Richard Gabriel's essay "The End of History and the Last Programming Language", which you can find at https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf . The point that stuck with me is "Languages are accepted and evolve by a social process, not a technical or technological one."

But I should add that when he wrote the essay the last programming language was C.

I'm sure it's a combination of mass hysteria and flocking behaviour in humans.

These find their origins in primitive survival techniques: there is safety in numbers, both for raising early alarms, and for protecting against stronger enemies.

I've had great fun with Common Lisp, and I quite liked Scala and recently Kotlin, but professionally I have to make do with Java, TypeScript and Python.

Oh, that translation ! Thanks for the laugh.

Darn, I didn't read that translation because I didn't need it. But it's a nice pun on how anglophones pronounce Latin like it were English.

As far as I know, nobody is sure how it's pronounced correctly.

I'm German and our teachers always said, Latin is easy to pronounce, just like you would do it in German, but that's just an educated guess.

People have been teaching each other how to pronouncing Latin non-stop since Ancient Rome. So, while it's probable that there's some deviation, it's not a guess at all.

Besides, most Latin languages agree on most of their sounds, so even if we didn't know how it sounds, that guess would be very highly educated.

Latin is actually very well attested, both in the classical and ecclesiastical pronunciation. There’s lots of languages, like Egyptian, where the phonology is pretty speculative, but Latin isn’t one of them.

Linguists have analyzed ancient texts (through common misspellings, poetry, etc) and mostly pieced together what it sounded at like at certain times/places. Pronunciation is a moving target and not much worth getting hung up on.

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