No best, just varying degress of badness.
It does have me wondering, like linguists have had to come up with some “objwctive” way to determine the “best” language.
There’s the obviously subjective way of whatever language is closest to your native language and since applicability is really all that’s matters whatever is “objectivly” the best it doesn’t matter too much but that doesn’t quite answer how a language could be the best.
I imagine things like closeness of written and spoken language, complexity of rules, I don’t know.
The bi-date part has got to be the worst one because it comes up so much.
Lot of work to do to define best. Shannon looked at redundancy. By numbers Copilot gives me, Russian is high, Mandarin low, English is in between. But some redundancy is good for ensuring the message gets across, so what’s best still depends.
Simpler questions: What’s the best computer language? What calculator notation is best? What number base is best? It still depends. Not sure what the point was, but Shannon made a calculator that worked with Roman numerals.
Related to this discussion, I made a post in the programming thread, rather than gunk it up here.
But I will add that I’m generally a big PITA to work with. My bosses often don’t like me. But my customers (internal or external) love me. I add features quickly, I suggest things the customer can’t articulate that they need, my apps don’t have screwy counterintuitive UX that confuses the user (I will revolt if I think I’ve been given a bad UX design to implement), and I give the customer white glove service. So my bosses put up with me.
The nice thing about being in this position is you don’t have to worry about who gets credit for what, because everyone already knows. This eliminates so much petty office politics BS. All glory to my boss, take all the credit you want. I know I’m secure.
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Everyone laughed at me for not using GPS to tell me every turn
I’m late to post but the 2025 World Darts Championship is well underway with the final happening on Jan 3. It’s the Super Bowl of darts. Should be free to watch in North America on Pluto’s Fanduel channel. Only real surprise of the tournament so far is that a relative unknown (#102 Christian Kist) hit a nine-darter.
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“You’ve seen Shakespeare on BBC2 but you’ve never seen drama like this”
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My brother went to the World Darts Championship once. Said it was one of the best days of his life. Just non stop drinking and fun.
Yea that’s why I had best in quotes. I’m sure there’s not a best language in all situations, but like programming languages the language you want depends but there are some aspects of the different languages that are better is so many more situations as to make the aspect generally desirable.
In any case it was just me brainstorming.
Me too.
Just to ramble some more, Shannon was a pretty unique dude. Another of his machines was just a box with one switch on it. You flipped the switch to turn it on and what happened was a hand would extend out of the box, flip the switch back to off, and disappear back into the box. I think that’s what might happen with some possible general AIs.
Found this video
Tough ticket these days.
COBOL
RPN
Binary “There are 1 kinds of people, those who know Binary and those who don’t”
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Esperanto
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Shouldn’t it be “10 kinds”?
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Who wants to set up the “best language” showdown thread?
The novelization of that Jim Carrey Scrooge movie is surprisingly good.
Anyone in here know anything about the current state of baseball cards? I have a couple nephews who are just getting into baseball and collecting cards and I wanted to give them some cards or packs as gifts. A brief google showed me that things have changed a lot since I was collecting in the early nineties, so I figured I’d ask here to see if anyone can give some recommendations as to packs or brands that are cool/valuable. I was thinking I might get us a bunch of packs and we could all open them or something along those lines.