

Who cares if languages become extinct? - abie
http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/2009/02/who-cares-if-languages-become-extinct/

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mechanical_fish
Let me translate for programming.reddit readers: There's a lot of hard-won,
specialized human knowledge encoded in CPAN, but if you don't have a Perl
hacker around you're doomed to reinvent it -- or, worse, to never even realize
it was there.

(Okay, I confess that I've taken liberties with the original, which is not
about computer languages at all, so you should all go read it. But I'm being
serious: This really is the argument. And it's a pretty good argument, though
it's a little stronger when applied to thousand-year-old human languages than
to twenty-year-old computer languages.)

For a more poetic take on the same thing listen to Wade Davis:
[http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/wade_davis_on_endangered_...](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/wade_davis_on_endangered_cultures.html)

