Name: Anonymous 2012-02-24 11:56
I was reading this article on Wikipedia
[ur]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Number_of_words_in_English[/utl]
And it got me thinking about how no English speaker anywhere could ever learn or use all of those words in a lifetime, and that the common speaker restricts themselves to around 10,000 words for everyday communication. English has thousands of rules, and tens of thousands of exceptions for every one. Upon reading a new word, you can't even pronounce it correctly, since English spelling is so divorced from the spoken word. Yet, English is the second most-used language in the world, trailing Mandarin by only a small margin, and twice as used as the third most-used language, Spanish.
It then dawned on me, that this is extremely similar to C++. People love to talk about how C++ is a horrible kludge of a language, smashing anything and everything into a huge ball of functionality, the entirety of which nobody could ever fully utilize. Yet, it is one of the most useful and widely-used programming languages in existence.
TL;DR: WE C++ NAO
[ur]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Number_of_words_in_English[/utl]
And it got me thinking about how no English speaker anywhere could ever learn or use all of those words in a lifetime, and that the common speaker restricts themselves to around 10,000 words for everyday communication. English has thousands of rules, and tens of thousands of exceptions for every one. Upon reading a new word, you can't even pronounce it correctly, since English spelling is so divorced from the spoken word. Yet, English is the second most-used language in the world, trailing Mandarin by only a small margin, and twice as used as the third most-used language, Spanish.
It then dawned on me, that this is extremely similar to C++. People love to talk about how C++ is a horrible kludge of a language, smashing anything and everything into a huge ball of functionality, the entirety of which nobody could ever fully utilize. Yet, it is one of the most useful and widely-used programming languages in existence.
TL;DR: WE C++ NAO