Benefit and belief

[rusi]

On Oct 21, 11:36 am, Ben Finney <ben+pyt... at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> rusi <rustompm... at gmail.com> writes:
> > The American programmer would profit more from learning Latin than
> > from learning yet another programming language.
>
> > Edsger Dijkstra in "On the fact that the Atlantic Ocean has two
> > sides"
>
> >http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD611.html
>
> It's ambiguous whether Dijkstra is saying anything positive about Latin
>  there.
>
> He could be saying “learning Latin would be a useful thing for average
> US programmers”.
>
> Or he could be saying “learning any second natural human language – even
> one as useless as Latin – will benefit the average US programmer more
> than learning another programming language”.
>
> I prefer to think someone as wise as Dijkstra would not be deluded as to
> the value of Latin, and lean more toward the latter meaning.

Well if you see the additional lines Chris has added or other personal
correspondences of EWD eg
http://digitalundivide.blogspot.com/2005/12/ewd-personal-reflection.html
Dijkstra clearly has a specific choice of latin.

It is easier to discount your view -- Dijkstra is wise -- than to deny
that Dijkstra was a devoted classicist -- music, languages and
ultimately programming.
And much bigger CSists than you and I -- eg Egon Borger, R W Hamming
etc -- have called Dijkstra a nut.

It seems to me that Dijkstra's quote would become a bit more
meaningful if one went up, so to speak, the class hierarchy.  He is
talking of 3 languages -- English, Latin and ones native tongue.
Generalizing (with slight inaccuracy) one could list 3 categories:

a communication language
b sacred/classical language
c mother tongue

Today a is singleton -- {English}
b is roughly {sanskrit, hebrew, arabic, latin, greek}
Each of these categories has a very different function just as Bach
and beatles have different functions.