It's cute how you resolve (!) a debate that encompasses linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science, psychology, neurology, and maybe a couple other sciences with a single link to some TED talk.
4,805 karma · joined March 15, 2013
The best community I know of is the LinguistList. I follow their RSS feeds to keep on top of what's happening in the field, but they also maintain many mailing lists, which you might wanna give a look.
There's also linguistics.stackexchange which does have some good content and answers.
There's some small linguist presence on Humanities Commons (https://hcommons.org).
LingBuzz is like an arXiV--discussion board hybrid thing.
If you're into conlanging, I know that some communities/subreddits exist but IDK the names or URLs, unfortunately.
Other than that sadly we don't have anything to the extent that CS or physics enjoy.
Edit: You're welcome, BTW. If you want to ask about anything more specific, resources or otherwise, I'd love to help.
Trying to talk about it a bit myself, I think I should start with saying that I don't really know methodology in pragmatics, but it and discourse analysis (DA) are pretty close to each other. Discourse analysis is an umbrella term for many research methodologies, and it's a hugely multidisciplinary field, so it's hard to pin it down. Tho suffice to say the concerns of DA inside of linguistics is separate from that in literary studies and the Foucauldian tradition, which tend more towards philosophical approaches. DA in Linguistics is more exact in general and focused on extents of written or aural or signed text and conversations. One of the most common tools is transcriptions peculiar to DA. There on we investigate different properties like structure, pauses or intonation in how they relate to different pragmatic goals, like turn taking in speech and signaling coherence, deixis, etc., in more "purer" DA research, and other strands of research like Critical Discourse Analysis or Feminist Discourse Analysis may then extrapolate how these reflect power relations or social preconceptions. This probably overlaps a lot with pragmatics---and a lot of theoretical and analytical tooling like speech act theory or Gricean maxims are shared---but AFAIU DA is more interested in textual (i.e. speech, not necessarily written) context here, whereas pragmatics in more mechanical and semiotic workings---tho I doubt subfields of linguistics are as distinct as some of the literature makes them seem to be. In any case, a more concrete method that's used a lot in DA (or other subfields) is corpus analysis, where large, often annotated corpora is used in order to test what constituents are found together.
Talking about your interest in math here, you may or may not find what you want in this. On the one hand, language is an incredibly flexible mechanism and almost everything, from words to farts to where one looks at has semiotic and discourse-relevant content, and this is something that conflicts a lot with more logically / mathematically motivated approaches like Chomskyan grammar. Simply put, language is hard to pin down, because unlike say in physics, chemistry, or astronomy, your subject matter is an extremely diverse, constantly changing beast that's produced with animals with extreme agency. But OTOH universe, biology, or materials are messy in their own ways and mathematical approaches have been useful in these pursuits. So it depends on where you come to it from, really.
As to the article you linked I'd say it falls under the umbrella of computational semantics which is an area I'm totally alien to (FWIW I'm more partial to usage based grammar and sociolinguistics). It does use corpora but that's not exclusive to discourse analysis (in fact its a methodology that began around the 90s and is used across all subdisciplines of linguistics today, maybe bar phonetics). There's an over reliance on the concept of the "word" as some basic elementary unit here, which is not really the case. There being a word to express something in a language or not is not really a barrier or obstacle to expressing it in any language. The study feels like it could really make use of another linguist among its authors. There are disciplines that explore language contact and variation, second language education, and translation in itself, which could have a word or two here.
A couple well known things the field mostly agrees: there are no real synonyms, in the sense that every word has its own semantic baggage, and that manifests different meanings in different contexts. So i.e. "use" and "utilise" are not at all the same words, one fancy.
Same goes for syntactic structures. There's a variety of approaches here, but you'd be hard pressed to find even a supporter of transformational generative grammar, the Chomskyan paradigm who says active and passive sentences come from the same underlying deep structure (roughly speaking), who'd say active and passive voice sentences are equal or equivalent in discourse.
Similarly, you can't boil down "complexity" to the length of sentences or number of clauses. I'd be more willing to concede if this was talking about the distance of things that refer to each other, or the number of words that refer to previous discourse or outer world (i.e. long-distance dependencies & deictic elements). But you can have paragraph long sentences that read just buttery smooth, and "sentence" itself is a pretty vague term that you can't really pin down. Like, if I splat that previous sentence into two around "and", would it really be two sentences, or is it really one sentence to begin with?
All these weird stuff like "don't use active voice" or "use 'simpler' words" etc. are the product of the same mentality that in ye olde times wanted you not to split infinitives, not to end your sentences with prepositions, and other nonsense up with which you should not put.
> Second, it feels like you have to spend a lot of time to set it all up.
You learn a subset that's relevant to you. Also there is which-key which helps _a lot_.
But, I mean how do you learn, say, Spanish? Do you just drop English and start speaking Spanish to everyone from day one? No, it's something that happens in a dedicated time. Once you feel comfortable enough, and when the chance presents itself, you being integrating it to your daily life.
Similarly with Emacs, you could just start playing with it, maybe say editing your personal scripts with it at times, using Org mode for some notes. And then slowly integrate it to your life.
No matter how much work is done in the UI compartment, a tool as comprehensive and customisable as Emacs will never be learnt in one day. There won't be any magic bullets. It's always like learning a language.
The important consideration is if the returns are worth the investments here. Unlike other editors---which are great software in their own ways, anybody who says "hackers should use Emacs or Vim" or similar BS just don't know what they're saying---, Emacs provides some particular opportunities, which depending on your workflow might not be worth it.
> Third, will it replace an IDE?
Yes, you can get it to do all that. OOTB is hard, but AFAIU projects like Spacemacs and Doom are kinda making that happen.
This is the most annoying thing with developers: many of them believe that a normal laptop from around 2010 is "underpowered" and everybody's using the latest macbook pro or some high-end device. But the majority of people use average computers with 4-8GB RAM and some random CPU. Most machines don't run on high-quality fast SSDs.
Also, the app is perfectly following the user guidelines of usable OSes: pre Win8 Windows and pre Gnome3 Linux. Those icons from the "90s" make sense and communicate their functionality well, because they adhere to some convention and are not pure fluff like FontAwesome et al. are. The sheer ignorance of dev community wrt. usability both in design and in performance is sad. Desktop is where people get work done and the bastardized mobile interfaces Win8, Gnome 3, and Electron brought there are nothing but an obstacle. Macs seem to not have gone to that direction yet, but slowly "advancing".
It's telling that none of the widely used IDEs---Even Android Studio or XCode---don't adhere to these bullshit "interface guidelines".
You can fix this temporarily via setting "xpinstall.signatures.required" to false. Toggle it back to true once update is released and you install it.
Meanwhile I'm hijacking this comment that is to the upper parts of the tree to state this: the way the community treats Mozilla and Firefox is horribly, inexplicably, unacceptably unfair.
This is nothing compared to innumerable other fuckups in software history, and even recent ones like goto fail, heartbleed, or Chrome logging you into Sync w/o notice.
This is a mistake, an easily recoverable one, and is not intentional or malicious. Firefox is developed in the out and open, all the processes are public. And people, with an absurd entitlement and malice, go as far as to call things backdoors or malware. Meanwhile the alternative actually is a backdoor ridden malware.
Please don't be this ungrateful.
> start with a little humility
> Recommended reading
Good god. I just remember why I stopped participating in this place.
Please read that book you yourself first before name dropping it.
What's described in this rant is basically "Source Available". Open Source means more than that, per ASF, per OSI, and per many who publish software under non copyleft licenses.
> The only people entitled to say how open source 'ought' to work are people who run projects, and the scope of their entitlement extends only to their own projects.
If this is the case, why open source or publish it in the first place? If you want people to read the code, but not interact with you, why not write that into the license? Why not use something like CC-SA?
> As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything at all. You are not entitled to contribute. You are not entitled to features. You are not entitled to the attention of others. You are not entitled to having value attached to your complaints. You are not entitled to this explanation.
Looking at that last sentence, then, why not STFU, Mr. Hickey? Assuming the "users" are Clojure programmers, if they're entitled merely to nil, why bother with this angsty rant?
> Open source is a licensing and delivery mechanism, period. It means you get the source for software and the right to use and modify it. All social impositions associated with it, including the idea of 'community-driven-development' are part of a recently-invented mythology with little basis in how things actually work, a mythology that embodies, cult-like, both a lack of support for diversity in the ways things can work and a pervasive sense of communal entitlement.
This is completely wrong. The reason we have open source in the first place is years long, decades long, determined community effort. Mr. Hickey is not entitled to change the definition of F/OSS.
If gatekeeping is bad, not checking who's passing through those gates when they're wide open is worse.
A nasty combination of all of those, probably some more.
I was very excited with Node.js when I first heard about it here on HN years ago. I enjoyed watching Dahl's presentation. But as soon as the crowd that went "it's JS, I can document.getElementsByClassName(...), so I can code servers" flocked in and npm became a thing, that was the end of Node.js as a nice, bright little thing.
I don't want to defend or encourage gatekeeping, but Node.js brought in lots of folk that did not know what they were doing into software development, and they did not stop to learn a thing or two before creating a monstrosity like npm or making things like leftpad and this possible and popular. And there wasn't any seasoned leaders like Python or Perl communities had, so all that happened with no authoritative opposition. If it was Node.lua or Node.pl, the world would've been a different place today for the software development community.
A language that doesn't have a decent standard library means that you'll have to use huge amounts of code that random strangers used, and the chain of dependencies will grow larger and larger.
In languages like Ruby and Python, you have a decent standard library, and then big libraries and frameworks that are maintained by the community, like Rails, Django, SqlAlchemy, Numpy, etc. That's healthy because it minimises or zeros the amount of small libraries maintained by a single guy, thus maximising the amount of code that you can trust (because you can trust the devs and development process of a popular library backed by a foundation or with many contributors).
With Node, almost every function comes from a different package. And there's no bar to entry, and no checks.
If Node.js is going to stay, someone needs to take on the responsability of forming a project, that belongs to an NGO or something, where the more popular libraries are merged and fused into a standard library, like that of Python's. Personally, I'm not touching it until then.
> maintains hundreds of packages
> hundreds
How can a single human reasonably and responsably do this? This number alone demonstrates how sloppy and inept the Node.js community's practices are.
Apparently you don't even know what you're comparing. In none of MacOS, Windows, Android or iOS is there a separate, standalone component that is a window manager. There is one huge OS, of which the desktop environment is a small part, and the window manager is a small, possibly unidentifiable part of that small part. Whereas a window manager is one part of a completely modular stack of software. It can definitely be perfected into something that works like those abovementioned systems (see elementary OS or Ubuntu, for example; and it's not like the "fit and finish" is there in Windows 10), but the thing is that the core userbase isn't in the market for that sort of perfection. I specifically use this stack of software (and there's way more to it than Linux itself) because I can decide what's perfect for me and still run loads of software on it wihout having to port them. Fit and finish is mine to do.
I totally understand that someone may not want to do that, there are distros for them (Android is one), and then there is Windows and MacOS, all are options. But you're criticising (some) distros for doing what they're supposed to do, i.e. being highly, even completely customisable. Furthermore, I can easily say "they look good in screenshots but whenever you go to use them, the fit and finish just isn't there" about Windows or Macs, and what that basically means in all of the cases is that I'm criticising an unfamiliar paradigm with total disregard for or ignorance of the motives that cause it to be the way it is.
Perl 6 is a nice experiment and may hold some ground in the future, but is not a practical tool or something in the same space as Perl 5 today. It's very unfortunate naming IMO.