Capsule review : English
Divorced from context—be it social, political, economic, what have you—English would deserve a perfect rating. It is a magnificent language, fluid and adaptable, delighting in both crunchy consonantal clusters and trippingly rhythmic polysyllabic sequences. If one were forced to choose only a single language on the basis of literature and lyrics, English would rank highly, a choice that many monoglots have the luxury of making, albeit unconsciously.
But no language exists outside of context. Take the social context of an activity like programming. Programming, like science, is an inherently communal activity, and the need for a common natural language as the scaffold for the machine-translatable language has allowed English to set even deeper roots in the field than in the sciences. For the sciences Gordin advocates for a re-babeling, tipping the scale back towards valuing facility of expression in one’s native language against the overwhelming need for global comprehensibility—one wonders if such a change would even be possible in the world of programming, or if the scale is permanently broken.
Rating : ☆☆☆☆☆
published