As a new parent, I've been preoccupied with a common question. I know - those of you who don't have children and still think things are "interesting" will be rolling your eyes. But nonetheless, I've been puzzling over the question of what language to get for my child. Firstly, the EULAs have gotten so complicated. Even the open source languages are not exactly straightforward anymore. I had my lawyer look over several of the licenses for open source and regular commercial languages - OK I say "my lawyer" but I just found her in the yellow pages - it cost my $500 and I still don't know what the hell she was talking about. I mean, the idea that anything you say falls under the Creative Commons license - what does that even mean? And I'm not even considering the ad-supported languages - I've already ruled out Googlish and Tacodan and the rest of those - I just can't do that to my child.
Really the rational thing to do would be just to sign up for MSpanglish - seriously, it's fine, widely supported, and with the new release fairly expressive. But there are the public domain languages to consider. Sanskrit and Latin have the advantage of not being spoken at all, which has limited their appeal, so even the support is incredibly cheap. And who speaks these days anyway? Ruby is interesting but a little too trendy for me - plus the literature is not very interesting, other than of course, Dickens.
Plus there are always new languages on the way - so, do you wait, or buy now and upgrade later? I just yesterday read about a new startup, well funded, that's developing an new language - purely tonal, and each of the 372 tones the human larynx can produce are mapped to a constantly updated histogram of currently popular topics (derived from popular searches, TV listings, Twitter, and an aggregate tag cloud called a tag cumulus) - so whatever you say, or even noise you make, it's guaranteed to be relevant.
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1 comment:
Well written article.
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