They were teaching us that in the 1980s, yes, but it was an overcorrection. They also taught us not to split our infinitives. That was BS as well. I see no need to maintain standards that were originally imposed by grammarians who undervalued English and overvalued Latin. These days we would call that linguistic insecurity.
Indeed, a lot of grammatical “rules” of English were a result of attempting to impose Latin grammatical rules upon English as part of the neoclassical movement of the 18th century. Split infinitives, dangling prepositions (English is somewhat of an outlier among Indo-European languages in that it lacks the practice of prefixing verbs with prepositions to form new verbs—consider e.g., Czech odjit (jit + od), Spanish contener (tener + con), Latin exeo (eo + ex), Greek καταστρέφω (στρέφω + κᾰτᾰ)¹) so arguably, phrase like “go with” fulfill that role and are not prepositions lacking an accompanying noun.
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1. While in most languages, this class of verbs becomes apparent when the base noun is irregular or has special conjugation rules, in Greek,² it’s especially noticeable thanks to the fact that the aorist causes a morphological change to the beginning of the verb as well as the end. Except for these verbs, the morphological change ends up happening in the middle of the verb.
2. I don’t know modern Greek beyond what I can discern from my classical Greek knowledge, so I don’t know if modern Greek has retained this feature.
This isn't how I read his conclusion. He's saying English will be different in fifty years, but he's not saying it'll be unrecognizable. Look how little difference there is between the 1900 passage and the 2000 passage.
This is true through 1300 or so. If you transliterate the 1200, 1100, and 1000 sections to modern glyphs, it's still a foreign language with the occasional recognizable word (such as "the"). Learning Old English in college was a lot like learning Latin: lots of recognizable vocabulary, totally unfamiliar case endings, mostly unfamiliar pronouns, arbitrary word order.
This is tangential to your point, but smallpox vaccine protects against mpox (the virus formerly known as monkeypox) and the CDC still recommends it for people in certain mpox risk groups.
That used the be the trick FAANG used to justify H1B visas. Onerous application requirements like mailed applications to prove there's no Americans wanting the job
My degree was not specifically CS, it was a related degree, the focus was on landing jobs, but they still covered some CS concepts because some students were in fact doing a CS degree. I was more focused on show me what I need to build things. I have never had to hand-craft any algorithm in my 15 years of coding, it just makes no sense to me. Someone else figured it out, I'm contempt understanding the algorithms.
In my twenty years, I've rerolled famous algorithms "every now and then".
Its almost wild to me that you never have.
Sometimes you need a better sort for just one task. Sometimes you need a parser because the data was never 100% standards compliant. Sometimes you need to reread Knuth for his line-breaking algorithm.
> We trained users to treat their devices like unruly animals that they can never quite trust. So now the idea of a machine that embodies a more clever (but still unreliable) animal to wrangle sounds like a clear upgrade.
I wish I didn't agree with this, but I think you're exactly right. Even engineers dealing with systems we know are deterministic will joke about making the right sacrifices to the tech gods to get such-and-such working. Take that a step further and maybe it doesn't feel too bad to some people for the system to actually not be deterministic, if you have a way to "convince" it to do what you want. How depressing.
Software is only deterministic if the software it relies on never changes. Forced updates make this impossible, so treating software as deterministic is actually wrong.
If you’ve ever spoken to employees of a public company that was sold to private equity, you’ll know how much of a difference there is. It is a significant difference.
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