> On the other hand it is a little tragedy that English with it's ambiguous spelling and pronunciation become the lingua franca of the day.
*English with its ambiguous spelling
On the other hand, Mandarin is hardly an improvement when it comes to avoiding ambiguity. Any other language would likely not be big enough to make it to lingua franca status anytime soon.
Again, English winning out so far is already a point for the good-enough, and exterminating other languages would mean giving up on better designs in favo(u)r of standardization on a suboptimal thing.
Is it cool that I can code JavaScript / Browser API almost everywhere these days? Hell yeah! Do I want to give up things that other languages offer (types, concurrency, non-web sockets, manual memory management where it makes sense) so we can all speak the same language? Maybe not.
I think efforts should go towards getting better at supporting diversity, rather than trying to water down everything to the lowest common denominator. Sure it's more effort, but it's not like you don't get anything for it in return.
*English with its ambiguous spelling
On the other hand, Mandarin is hardly an improvement when it comes to avoiding ambiguity. Any other language would likely not be big enough to make it to lingua franca status anytime soon.
Again, English winning out so far is already a point for the good-enough, and exterminating other languages would mean giving up on better designs in favo(u)r of standardization on a suboptimal thing.
Is it cool that I can code JavaScript / Browser API almost everywhere these days? Hell yeah! Do I want to give up things that other languages offer (types, concurrency, non-web sockets, manual memory management where it makes sense) so we can all speak the same language? Maybe not.
I think efforts should go towards getting better at supporting diversity, rather than trying to water down everything to the lowest common denominator. Sure it's more effort, but it's not like you don't get anything for it in return.