I had the chance to attend some of Father Reginaldus’s summer school in 1999, and it sparked a lifelong love of Latin. The article did a wonderful job capturing the verve that Reginaldus brought to the material.
I’ve always imagined the Recurse Center being similar-ish for programming.
Second-year high school students do read actual Roman texts, but they typically do so very slowly and laboriously - a day’s homework might be translating a single paragraph.
I studied Latin from 7th grade through my early undergraduate years (1990s to early 00s), and that dynamic didn’t change as much as you might expect - the focus remains on deeply reading a few texts, rather than building the fluency required to quickly read and understand new texts on unfamiliar subjects. The corpus of texts for standardized exams is also relatively small and well-known - I didn’t see a single unfamiliar passage on either AP Latin exam.
Perhaps some classics professors read Latin as fluently as the average Spanish literature professor reads a Madrid newspaper, but I certainly never met any outside Reginaldus’s orbit.
It’s certainly possible to gain that fluency, as Reginaldus demonstrated. But it seemed to me that fluency reading unfamiliar texts simply wasn't the goal of my Latin education; instead, we were studying to know Catullus, Ovid, Horace, Cicero, and Vergil, with a small smattering of other Roman authors. It was an education in classics, not the Latin language. We just weren’t asked to extract information from large volumes of text, speak extemporaneously, or comprehend casual conversation.
The best analogy I can give is this: imagine taking Spanish from grades 7-12, culminating in a full year reading and understanding selections of Don Quixote. The entire curriculum builds towards this capstone year, and other areas of inquiry get very short shrift. Nobody cares if you can live comfortably in a Spanish-speaking country or watch Spanish-language TV. Nobody cares about modern idiom, or any more recent works of literature, or technical writing. s/Don Quixote/Aeneid + a small corpus of Roman poems/g and you have the bulk of my Latin education.
This sounds negative - we weren’t fluent in Latin! But for a teenager, it was a wonderfully deep exploration of Rome’s greatest hits. I loved it.
>Foster was basically the rallying point for people opposed to the grammarian methods of teaching languages that started in Classics but ended up taking over how foreign language is taught in most schools and contexts
Humans naturally learn languages when they are immersed in the language. It sounds like Latin instruction was more focused on rules, and didn't provide that immersion before Foster. I can attest that many other foreign language classes also don't provide enough immersion to really learn the language, although being limited to ~10 hours a week makes that virtually impossible.
It's because you only ever translate but never speak or synthesize latin exept in a few church circles where it is or was used as Lingua Franca (such as depicted in Conclave last year). I understand the original post to be about the profound difference this makes in acquiring a language intuitively.
I'm skeptical how much speaking/synthesizing the language matters if you only care about reading.
I can read German moderately well (can get through newspaper articles pretty easily, and novels with some effort), but I have very little ability to synthesize it (it'd take me quite a lot of effort to construct a sentence in writing, and I can't really speak at all). But the lack of ability to produce the language doesn't seem to negatively impact my reading ability.
Even StreamNative is effectively abandoning Pulsar and going all-in on the Kafka protocol. I can see the theoretical benefits of Pulsar, but it just doesn’t seem to have the ecosystem momentum to compete with the Kafka juggernaut.
It sure looks like they’re going quite a ways beyond Kafka-on-Pulsar - the Ursa/Oxia work they’re focused on right now replaces BookKeeper and seems very firmly Kafka-oriented. Or does Ursa also work with the Pulsar protocol?
It’s not obvious from the website, but Rob Pike and Andrew Gerrand started work on Upspin after stepping back from the Go team. I suspect that many of the folks early to Go have at least occasionally checked in on Upspin.
I’m sad to see this chapter of their work shut down, but excited to see where each of them goes from here.
It’s interesting that the author now works on TigerBeetle (written in Zig). As I understand it, TigerBeetle’s style guide leans heavily on this style of resource management.
I’ve always imagined the Recurse Center being similar-ish for programming.
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