Pure

[Meta]

On Wednesday, 8 January 2014 at 20:21:22 UTC, John Carter wrote:
>> > Very well written, a pleasure to read.
>
>> And very hard to translate! :)
>
> Leaping off the immediate topic of computer language D into the 
> realm
> of human languages English and Turkish...
>
> With the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis in the back of my mind...
>
> What makes it harder to translate?
>
> Is there a human language in which these concepts would be more 
> easily
> discussed?
>
> I was always fascinated by early translations (1980 and before 
> era) of
> Japanese machine manuals... It was tempting to find the
> mistranslations funny, until I realised...
>
> * You could never remember the words. Your memory is 
> fundamentally
> governed by the language you speak. Thus when you try remember 
> (and
> relate to a colleague) a subtly garbled chunk of that language, 
> your
> brain autocorrects it and refuses to reproduce the mistakes!
>
> * The differences indicated curious and subtle differences in 
> thought
> processes of the original authors and translators. Not better 
> or worse
> processes. Different. Interesting. Subtle.
>
> * The categories of mistakes made by, say German German to 
> English
> translators, were very different.
>
> So I have always been fascinated by Sapir-Whorf, but it seems 
> to be
> very subtle and nuanced and unexpected in practical effect.
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 8:26 AM, Ali Çehreli 
> <acehreli at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> On 01/08/2014 11:09 AM, Paolo Invernizzi wrote:
>>
>>> This one is a good introduction, or at least the best one I 
>>> can remember:
>>>
>>> http://klickverbot.at/blog/2012/05/purity-in-d/
>>>
>>> Very well written, a pleasure to read.
>>
>> And very hard to translate! :) In case a Turkish reader is 
>> interested, here
>> is the translation:
>>
>>   http://ddili.org/makale/saflik.html
>>
>> Ali

On a small tangent, I believe the Sapir-Whorf thesis has been 
disproved. However, I definitely think there might be a similar 
effect of programming languages on programmers.