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iafisher's comments

iafisher | 4 years ago | on: Nepalese student learns HTML, JavaScript, CSS using just a mobile phone

> I appreciate your story, but this comment bothered me, because it's something people repeat a lot and it's actually not true. There's no good evidence that adults have more difficulty acquiring language than children. There were some older studies that claimed to show such, but as has become all too familiar these days, their methods were spurious and there have been some replication issues.

According to a 2018 paper [1], the ability to acquire new languages declines steeply after age 17.

[1] Hartshorne, Joshua K., Joshua B. Tenenbaum and Steven Pinker. 2018. A critical period for second language acquisition: evidence from 2/3 million English speakers. Cognition 177:263-277. https://l3atbc-public.s3.amazonaws.com/pub_pdfs/JK_Hartshorn...

iafisher | 5 years ago | on: Type-safe generic data structures in C

Author here. I wish I had made it clearer that the intent of the post was "this is an interesting and surprising thing you can achieve in C" and not "this is a good idea for a real software project" or "this is a reason to use C instead of C++/Rust/Go".

iafisher | 7 years ago | on: Shavian alphabet

The problem with making spelling more phonetic is that not everyone pronounces English the same. Even a single country like the United States or the United Kingdom counts a range of accents and dialects. A phonetic spelling is always going to be non-phonetic for some speakers.

iafisher | 7 years ago | on: Learn C and Build Your Own Lisp (2014)

I read this book about a year ago and later wrote another Lisp [1] from scratch but based on the design in the book. It's still one of my favorite computer science books. He covers quite a range of topics (C programming, traditional Lisp stuff, some other functional programming topics like currying) and the quality is superb. One thing the Lisp interpreter described in the book lacks (if I recall correctly) is a proper garbage collector, which can be an interesting extension to the project if you're up for a challenge.

[1] https://github.com/iafisher/scam

iafisher | 7 years ago | on: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

> For instance I'd PERSONALLY consider Portuguese to be OBJECTIVELY harder than Spanish.

Emphasis mine.

I don't mean to say that some languages aren't more difficult for speakers of a particular language to learn--no doubt French is easier for English speakers to learn than Chinese. A speaker of a different language that is also tonal would likely find Chinese easier to learn, though. What you're really measuring is not complexity but similarity.

You have a good point that some languages may have more difficult writing systems than others. Linguists traditionally don't consider orthography to be part of a language proper, as a language can have multiple writing systems (like Serbo-Croatian) or none at all, but you're right that most people don't make that fine a distinction between language and writing system.

I didn't mean to be overly critical of the article, which I mostly enjoyed, but saying that a language is "simple" or "rigid" carries a lot of cultural and political baggage--think about how Europeans of the colonial period denigrated African languages, or how in the United States, Australia and Canada indigenous children were punished for using their own language.

iafisher | 7 years ago | on: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

Claims about the relative simplicity or complexity of different languages are rarely grounded in actual linguistic evidence. Languages comprise so many parts that it's not even clear what the basis of comparison could be: is English, a language with highly restricted word order but without grammatical case marked on most nouns, more complex than Russian, a language with comparatively free word order but a highly articulated case system? Who can say?

With that in mind, the statements about Bahasa Indonesian being simpler or more rigid than other languages are more like social or cultural judgments than bonafide linguistic facts.

iafisher | 7 years ago | on: How to Make Everything Ourselves: Open Modular Hardware

One thing that Lego does very well despite (or perhaps because of) being a closed system is ensuring the consistent quality of all its bricks. In the years I played with Legos as a child I never encountered two bricks that didn't fit together perfectly. I wonder if an open standard would be able to achieve the same consistency.
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