HexesofVexes
Why, a hexvex of course!
- 0 Posts
- 9 Comments
Ah, an artistic expression saying “you must learn our language, see how it feels for you to subvert your culture to do something needful”?
Hardly an avant-garde notion today, but in 2010 it may well have been.
I can appreciate the beauty of what was created, though I suspect it failed to move people in the way it was intended. To me, it seems an illogical step backwards, rather than a meaningful stride forwards, as I see it from a pedagogical perspective. Others may disagree, but such is art.
True, but I think the principle still holds.
When I talk about a “print”, “if”, “for” or “while” I am universally understood by the majority of coders. This means, someone with those concepts can use any logic flow making use of those terms with a minimum of learning.
However, if I speak of “gable”, “gyr” or “wabbajack”, then trouble begins, for now I have no tutorials nor guides. Let us say these are not merely localisations, but new concepts, then the question comes of completeness and how it is proved.
In essence, one either recreates Babel, where no two people can understand one another, and collaboration quickly slips away. Or, one builds a tower upon the sand, that has no logical foundation to anchor it, this rendering it worse than useless to those who learn it.
Excel would like to know your location
Jokes aside, alternative command words for different languages make it harder, not easier, to teach programming. I run some excel labs at the start of my course, and trying to troubleshoot students using their own devices set to their mother tongue is pain.
You just captured the daily life of a UK academic after the catastrophically low recruitment numbers this year.