What you say is what other people say

Submitted by reeses on Sat, 2004-08-21 11:46. | computing | programming

This paper is killing me. Well, not this paper itself, although it's rather suspect. The thing that is killing me is the inane commentary regarding the paper.

"one, two, many," of course reminded me of Pratchett. Maybe if we freeze them, they'll start doing higher math.

As an example of the inanity, please observe the following comment snippet, rated "5, insightful".

...is anything so dramatic going on? "Western" people with the proper training and experience could tell the difference at a glance between a screen full of C programming and a screen full of FORTRAN. My grandmother would struggle with that task. It would just all look like gibberish to her.

I'm not really interested in the Sapir-Whorf debate. Well, I take that back, I'm very interested in the Sapir-Whorf debate, which is why I got sucked into reading these comments.

What I'm really interested in is the number of people who feel eminently qualified to comment on a debate that has raged for fifty years, based upon no thing more than reading the header of an article on Slashdot. "Bugger Noam Chomsky, I can program some Perl and use a rootkit, so I know I'm just as smart!"

As you may have guessed, this entry is another excuse to force kitty pictures on you. Is the Internet good for anything else?

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