2902 - Functional

2014-09-28

I am a programmer and programming means to build something that nobody ever has built, following unclear plans to vaguely described places, often using tools that nobody ever before has used, and when you think you’re done, the client tells you that the office building that he has ordered should in reality be a palace, but for the price of a stable.

That’s not all though. The world is changing and in order to stay in business, to stay relevant, you better learn constantly.

That’s what I do now. I’ve learned the whole JavaScript ecosystem last winter, found it lacking in many ways, and now I am busy learning Scala, a hybrid language bridging the paradigms of object-oriented and functional programming. Sounds involved but I enjoy it 🙂

The Song of the Day is “Functional” by Thelonious Monk. Hear it on YouTube.

There are 5 comments

Cedric Canard   (2014-09-28)

I am intrigued by the use of English in the graffiti. Is this common?

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andreas   (2014-09-29)

Yes. Long ago we lost a war and our culture 🙂 Don't get me wrong, I think it is exactly what "we" deserved, but that's what happens when a war is lost or for some other reason a culture gets dominated. It happened on many levels. For my generation german music was highly suspicious. Today we see "new folk music" in german language or dialects, and it's not only the old Nazis who flock to it. Much to the contrary, I'd say. The same happened with movies. All that is helped by the general concentration in content production. One of the best fantasy role playing games that I know of, Gothic, is by a geman development studio and it was originally developed in german language only. After the initial success they produced an english version - and it was awful. Today the studio produces for the international market, and that's English first. But back to WW2. We did not only lose a war, we lost much of our intellectual elite, either because they were Jews, or because they just didn't want to live in a totalitarian nightmare. We also lost our scientists, the innocent who left because they needed to or wanted to, as well as the not so innocent who were hired by the US military. Look at medicine, chemistry or physics. The dominant language in those fields before WW2 was German, but today it is English. Russian played a role for a long time, but in the end the Russians lost the cold war or simply gave it up, and along with that, their language lost importance as well. You really found English dominating even before the advent of the Internet, and of course global communication and globalization in general act as multiplicators. You also see the phenomenon in other languages. Just ask the French or the Spanish, but in their cultures the insistence on their own language is not coupled to the memory of a hideous crime. And even they struggle. Here in Austria/Germany there has not even been much effort to begin with, just because it was always suspicious and looked revisionist.

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Cedric Canard   (2014-10-01)

Thanks for this explanation Andreas. I would say there are many endangered cultures these days. And languages too I dare say. In fact where culture and language is concerned we are quickly becoming homogeneous.

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andreas   (2014-10-01)

Which is of course not necessarily a bad thing. For instance it makes it easy to have a conversation with you 🙂

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Cedric Canard   (2014-10-01)

Very true, and a pleasure it is too.

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