On the other hand, perhaps Chinese and English will spawn some linguistic bastard child…

There is more to expressiveness than word counts.
I feel limited in English, despite having spoken it
most of my life, because it simply lacks entire
affective registers efficiently expressible in some
other languages with particles, diminutives, etc.
These would be so unnatural to reproduce in English
that it is never done, as a result of which certain
modalities are simply never expressed in English.

Where a dictionary proceeds in a circular manner, defining a word by reference to another, the basic concepts of mathematics are infinitely closer to an indecomposable element“, a kind of elementary particle” of thought with a minimal amount of ambiguity in their definition.

ftp://ftp.alainconnes.org/maths.pdf

As a layman, I understand this. Simple and direct. Yet in imaging if you exploded those views from the math basis could ambiguity creep in? Sure.

That’s why we need good teachers who can master both for the public at large. Good computer modellers who can match the math to visualizations

Often I find that those who had done well critized, like , Smolin, Greene, and the many other fine writers, who had brought the public up to date.

Who You Going to Call!

So looking at Clifford’s threesome, I might call it, Science’s Ghost/Myth Busters?

Just for writing general code, I actually like C#. Although writing in a language with reference types AND garbage collection still makes me a bit queasy.

On the subject of English and science, I reckon that it’s largely chance, too (in the sense that it’s not been picked on its intrinsic merits for communicating science). Lucky for me, as I blow when it comes to learning languages, although I have some facility with science.

I’d be inclined to lean heavily on the element of historical contingency here. The labile vocabulary or simpler grammar of English were not sufficient to displace French (earlier) or German (later). Many pre-war non-native German-speaking scientists were perfectly reasonable in regarding that language as somehow more precise in expression, and thus preferable as the language of science, if not the lingua franca.

So, are there any practical advantages to adopting an ideographic language like Chinese, or are these simply demographic arguments? I suspect English will remain the language of international science even as the American empire declines.

Not that I’ve ever used FORTRAN 90. It was 77 that I learnt. If I was teaching physics undergrads a language, though, I think that I’d be doing them more of a service in general to teach them c++ (or even, ick, Java).

I guess that, over time, there will be enough library stuff available for some proper mathematical programming, even if only through contributions by enthusiasts (which reminds me to check on how mono is doing).

I like chinese,
I like chinese,
There’s nine hundred million of them in the world today,
You’d better learn to like them, that’s what I say.

Speaking of math in the .NET Framework classes and the CLR, see this post by Wesner Moise.

We can all be grateful that it’s no longer FORTRAN.

I wouldn’t be surprised if C# replaces C++; it’s a little slower, but it’s easier to write.