The death of languages

I was reading this BBC article about the Death of Language. The heading reads: “An estimated 7,000 languages are being spoken around the world. But that number is expected to shrink rapidly in the coming decades. What is lost when a language dies?”

The most interesting part for me was:
"What we lose is essentially an enormous cultural heritage, the way of expressing the relationship with nature, with the world, between themselves in the framework of their families, their kin people," says Mr Hagege.
"It's also the way they express their humour, their love, their life. It is a testimony of human communities which is extremely precious, because it expresses what other communities than ours in the modern industrialized world are able to express."

I could not help wondering if it is the same thing with programming languages. They are definitely a product of their time and a specific culture/idea for which they were developed. They have been evolving over time like any other language. I wonder what we would loose if for instance COBOL was to disappear or maybe something like Prolog.

To some extend, a programming language is there to help solving a specific problem. If there is another programming language which helps you do the same thing better and faster, surely you do not loose much. In a sense, a human language is not that different, it tries to address the communication problem.

Which ever way I turn the ideas around, I think it is both a shame and no big deal if we loose such thing. It is something more tangible than a nostalgia for a world/historical passage of our world. Languages try to address the way we see the world at a point in time. When we loose that language, we loose maybe a dimension of the world we look at. Every language is a compromise to express something. It reflects the choices we make and our priorities. When we have a new language, we may or may not carry this dimension with us and maybe we now are looking at the world only in a certain way and completely missing this other dimension which could have made a big difference in our perception of it.

Of course it is highly impractical to keep all of them and to some extend if everyone was speaking the same language it would be a lot easier. Being a foreigner and all, I cannot help thinking wouldn’t it be a lot easier if everyone would speak English? Or technically I don’t really care which one it is. But then I am fearful of a world limited to only English words. Maybe there is something equivalent to poetry for programming languages, that is an interesting idea. I wonder what that would look like. We know programming can produce visual and audio art. I wonder what poetry could look like. Maybe a requirement for any application should also include artistic element to it.

Yahoo not in search anymore?

I was reading this article.

The most sticking comment were from a Yahoo search expert who came from Microsoft:

“Maarek came to Yahoo from Google, where she was instrumental in the development of front-end presentation enhancements such as Google Suggest. In her view, the last decade brought a revolution in the way Web pages are crawled, indexed, and presented to the user: a revolution that saw Google come out a clear winner.”

If Bing is now replacing the Yahoo search engine, Microsoft now owns the data displayed by Yahoo. O’Reilly has been saying for a while I believe that it is all about the data. Does not really matter how much Yahoo claims it is about presentation, I can’t believe this can be correct. Presentation is just so easily copied, that can’t possibly be the only hedge.

With my limited wisdom I believe that what they are really after is another kind of data, the user habits data. If they can collect and harness that data, they can provide the kind of results I have been blogging about targeted to you. If they can achieve that I suppose that might give them the edge.

I can’t help being suspicious, if they do not own the data, they now become dependent on it. Microsoft is not known for his competitors’ friendly tactics. They might require Yahoo to give them a way to gather the same type of data. Or, knowing that Bing powers the search, why would any new user go through Yahoo instead of Bing directly? That can only mean one thing, a slowly decreasing number of users. They are going to have to find the kind of applications that will make users want to stay, some kind of integrated portal to access most of services people would want to access on-line.

If that is the case, Yahoo is becoming the provide of Software as a Service. There is a fierce competition out there with so many areas to be addressed. Who would be able to know which ones to start with and which ones they will focus on first. If I am right, which would be a small miracle, we should see more applications coming at of Yahoo starting with a better email/IM (oh wait, I think they have already done that).