Language Log

It's a shame that I like Y Combinator the organization so much, because I find the y combinator as a programming concept to be aesthetically displeasing.

It only makes sense in the untyped lambda calculus, where types are all conflated and errors are forbidden. It relies on the fact that you can take any x and "apply x to itself". These properties are essentially gimmicks of the untyped lambda calculus. It's like the saying "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." The untyped lambda calculus, they made it even simpler.

Yes, you can reduce everything to a very tiny number of combinators, but at the cost of making everything ugly. It is much cleaner to use Lisp and reduce everything to a slightly larger set of primitives. Ironically (?) one of the best explanations of this is PG's own The Roots Of Lisp - https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/llog/jmc.pdf

The deepest and most radical opinions of Lisp are:

- You should be able to implement Lisp-in-Lisp within a few pages of code. This a profound and remarkable design constraint. (See http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/llog/jmc.pdf (PDF) for an introduction.)

- Syntax would only hide the fact that code is a simple data structure that can be manipulated like any other data structure.

Just like Rust's strong opinions buy you stress-free threading and bit-banging, Lisp's opinions ensure that it's an almost ideal environment for inventing domain-specific language extensions.

But Rust is poorly suited to object graphs where everything mutates everything else, and Common Lisp is poorly suited to proving that a large program obeys certain strict rules.

I love opinionated tools, but I try to choose ones with the "right" opinions for the task at hand.

This is a very misleading headline. As one commenter on the /r/linguistics discussion[1] notes,

>"Although the findings remain purely correlational, and not based on any experimental evidence", they use 10% of the world's languages, and the ecological factors all taken together amount to 25% of the factors influencing vowel/consonant distribution. Not very convincing.

The paper was given at a conference, so the findings are preliminary at best. The connection between geography and characteristics of language is still very poorly understood. For a similar idea, cf. Daniel Everett [of Pirahã fame]'s son's paper claiming that ejectives are correlated with altitude[2].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/3rluhy/human_language_may_be_shaped_by_climate_and/

[2] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4685

The amazon "I'm sorry but I cannot fulfill this request it goes against OpenAI use policy. My purpose is to provide helpful and respectful information to users-Brown" listing reminds me of this restaurant in Shanghai when I lived there. The chef who opened it was famous in his local area and wanted a beautiful name for the Shanghai location, and have it in English to reflect the cosmopolitan international city of Shanghai. So he chose a line from his favorite poem, put it through google translate and named it, in big letters above the entrance, "Translation not Found".

Edit The story above that I heard was likely an exaggerated version of this: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=301 - I still like the urban legend version I heard so keeping it up there.

Sure. First off, note that if you read her 2002 work about gender, it often relies on a(n in) famous "bridge study". In 2002, she mentioned it as "publication forthcoming"; 17 years later, it still hasn't been published.

But a general good overview of her statements regarding to blame, and why they fail, can be found on LanguageLog [1]. I'd also recommend searching LanguageLog, as there's other articles discussing how she often overstates the conclusions, and how the media takes it ever farther. If you're on Reddit (can't access it currently on work WiFi), search in /r/linguistics and /r/badlinguistics to find even more criticisms of it (and other Linguistic Relativity research).

[1] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2592

Vocal fry is more commonly noticed and criticized in women but I haven't gotten the impression that there's definitive evidence that women do it more than men since most of the studies have been pretty small or localized.

Mark Liberman has been covering this for years over at Language Log and there appears to be a great deal of ongoing debate within the academic community:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/index.php?s=%22vocal+fry%22

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=20155 discusses male usage and briefly mentions the study from your second link.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=13020 has some graphs of what exactly this means sound-wise and http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3626 discusses the history.