In Other Words
It's Friday. The end of another week. I'm sitting in the junk room in front of my work laptop, picking through source code of a recent project written by a co-worker in a language I have little experience of. In some ways it's easier to learn from existing code than a text-book or a tutorial video.
It's funny – although I don't know many real-world languages, I know countless computer languages, and feel perfectly at ease switching between them throughout the working day. Ask me to direct a taxi in France or Germany though, and I'll start stumbling over words.
I guess one of the traits that software development has left me with is a fascination in how language works – the underlying structures and rules – why words are combined in the way they are. While visiting Germany regularly over the last few years, I loved the mechanical nature of the language – where many longer words are created by combining smaller words.
While chatting over a coffee one day, an Austrian colleague said something I will never forget – “you English – you say things without saying them”. She was right – we do. She has since moved on to further adventures, and I kind of miss her approach to dealing with the world. Some saw it as blunt, or rude. I saw straightforward and transparent.
Anyway.
Time to make a coffee. It's always time to make a coffee.