This was fascinating for me. I had an experience early in my career where I was given some code written by a Spanish engineer to port, and the Spanish comments and variable names kept interfering with my ability to see the code structure. I ended up converting all the variables to simple letter/number sequences and removing all the comments in order to get past that.
Years later I read papers by linguists which described concepts in one language that were no expressible in another language. That too seemed pretty amazing to me since something like snow is snow right? But English typically has adjectives doing the heavy lifting to distinguish different kinds, but the Inuit people had even more words[1].
The idea that it might be possible to express computation differently in different languages, or perhaps even more effectively, seems really intriguing.
[1] "Yet Igor Krupnik, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center in Washington, believes that Boas was careful to include only words representing meaningful distinctions. Taking the same care with their own work, Krupnik and others charted the vocabulary of about 10 Inuit and Yupik dialects and concluded that they indeed have many more words for snow than English does." -- https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/there...
Years later I read papers by linguists which described concepts in one language that were no expressible in another language. That too seemed pretty amazing to me since something like snow is snow right? But English typically has adjectives doing the heavy lifting to distinguish different kinds, but the Inuit people had even more words[1].
The idea that it might be possible to express computation differently in different languages, or perhaps even more effectively, seems really intriguing.
[1] "Yet Igor Krupnik, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center in Washington, believes that Boas was careful to include only words representing meaningful distinctions. Taking the same care with their own work, Krupnik and others charted the vocabulary of about 10 Inuit and Yupik dialects and concluded that they indeed have many more words for snow than English does." -- https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/there...