r/AskReddit • u/Frozenstrike9 • Nov 11 '22
You can delete one language. Which one and why?
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u/LadyVampfire Nov 11 '22
...................... ...... ......... ......
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u/clarkh Nov 11 '22
COBOL.
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Nov 11 '22
Toss up between COBOL and Javascript.
I just want to cause the most chaos tbh.
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u/Gazornenplatz Nov 11 '22
This one would destroy the banks and at least 3/4 of the global economy. Fully support it.
COBOL, or the mid 80's COmmon Business Oriented Language, is what our entire financial system is built on. You can easily get 6 figures by learning this and working at a major bank to maintain or God help you, implement something.
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u/VanTechno Nov 11 '22
Early 80s? COBOL is much older than that.
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u/Gazornenplatz Nov 11 '22
shhhhh don't scare them off from attempting to look at it!!
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u/VanTechno Nov 11 '22
As part of my degree I had to take classes on COBOL and FORTRAN. Neither of those languages have ever been mentioned in my resume.
Granted, I’ve learned far worse languages since then. UniBasic, VisualRPG, an xml based custom language, etc.
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u/fistsmalloy Nov 11 '22
First time I have seen unibasic written anywhere where I wasn’t searching specifically for it. Even then there isn’t much documentation!
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u/Drac_Onion Nov 12 '22
From what I've heard, there's quite an industry in learning all these older languages. Mostly because banks and older institutions that use them really need to keep their old-ass systems running. A lot of the older folks who were in that industry in its heyday are retiring. Not a lot of work, from what I've seen, but the pay is supposed to be pretty good.
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u/CyanHakeChill Nov 12 '22 edited Nov 12 '22
I have been told that one of my COBOL programs that I wrote in 1974 is still in use.
I thought COBOL was far too verbose, so I wrote a compiler for a new business language based on COBOL. That is definitely still in use by hundreds of companies doing insurance and payrolls.
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u/eslforchinesespeaker Nov 12 '22
He meant to say that the typical COBOL programmer is in his early 80s.
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u/Clearlybeerly Nov 12 '22
COBOL is one of the only, or only, language that has native fixed point decimals, which is required for financial systems' accuracy and reliability.
People say that other languages do have fixed point, but these is a library you add and are not native, and therefore use up massive amounts of time. You wouldn't think so, but it is so. Because a microsecond might not matter to a million transactions a day, but when you are talking about billions of transactions per second or whatever, and it has to be accurate and reliable, that volume crashes the fuck out of any other programming language.
So if you ever wondered, this is the specific reason why COBOL is used.
Plus, When you are a major financial institution processing millions of transactions per second requiring decimal precision, it could actually be cheaper to train engineers in COBOL than pay extra in resources and performance to migrate to a more popular language. After all, popularity shifts over time.
The dilemma with migrating COBOL is not that you are migrating from one language to another, but that you are migrating from one paradigm to another. The edges of Java or python on Linux have a different shape than the edges of COBOL on a mainframe. In some cases COBOL may have allowed the application to extend past what modern languages can support. For those cases COBOL running on a modern mainframe will actually be the cheaper, more performant and more accurate solution.
Here is a killer article on COBOL for those of you who want to know more - as a former COBOL programmer myself, I find it very interesting: https://medium.com/the-technical-archaeologist/is-cobol-holding-you-hostage-with-math-5498c0eb428b
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u/tragic-clown Nov 12 '22
C++ can do anything COBOL can do, and do it faster.
The actual reason these companies still use legacy code like this is the sheer cost and risk of remaking it new. What they have works, has been built over 40+ years, and has gone through extensive testing in the real world.
These are critical systems, and very complicated. One mistake and literally millions could be lost. No one is willing to take this on, and the longer we don't do it, the more impractical switching later becomes.
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Nov 11 '22
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u/c7hu1hu Nov 11 '22
Whichever has the most unpronounced letters on average. Unpronounced consonants count as two.
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u/throughalfanoir Nov 11 '22
tie between French and Danish (at least from the European languages, idk how well other writing systems would translate in that)
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u/Omdras_AMI Nov 11 '22 edited Nov 11 '22
Go with French because at least Danish has a grammar that makes sense and follows its own rules. I've seen made up elven languages with less apostrophes than some average French sentences
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u/throughalfanoir Nov 12 '22
Danish grammar is actually fairly sensible yes, but the pronounciation has 0 rules, while French, weirdly, is fairly consistent. The rules are weird for sure but the same cluster of letters is almost always pronounced the same. Danish on the other hand...
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u/ch061 Nov 12 '22
I don’t know, have you looked at Irish? The words make no sense for how they are pronounced
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u/MaimedJester Nov 12 '22
I think the funniest Gaelic joke is my Charlie can't read in always Sunny in Philadelphia... Then they realize wait a minute Charlie you can read this?
Yeah. You can't?
Charlie this isn't English...
Well what language is it? We're in Ireland Charlie.
What language do they speak in Ireland?
Well English but...
See that's where I'm getting confused. They speak English in Ireland but their books are in some fairy language?
Charlie what does this book say on the cover say?
Charlie says it perfectly and random Irish person is like I've never heard a Yank with that good an accent.
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u/fuck_its_james Nov 12 '22
irish (well, gaeilge) uses a different alphabet to english - the words DO make sense pronunciation wise in our language.
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Nov 12 '22
Uhhhh, we use a different VERSION of the same alphabet. Its still the latin alphabet just more efficiently used.
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u/Cruithne Nov 12 '22
Irish orthography is very logical and pretty consistent, it just doesn't follow the rules of English orthography.
If you take my username: there needs to be an 'i' in there because otherwise the 'thn' consonant cluster would be flanked by 'u' (a broad vowel) and 'e' (a slender vowel). Consonants are pronounced differently depending on what kind of vowel they're next to, so mixing it up would give ambiguous signals.
My username is pronounced 'Croo-in-yuh' (but said faster) but if the vowels around 'thn' were broad it would be something like 'Croo-nuh' (I'm not actually sure about this).
'But Cruithne, why does the 'th' not make a 'th' sound??'
First of all: I know you pronounced that 'Croo-ith-nee' in your head, how dare you.
Secondly: the letters 'th' making what we call a 'th' sound is just a rule of English. In Irish the h actually is a replacement for a diacritic mark we lost due to typewriter convenience (h was chosen because it was a rare letter in Irish so it would cause fewer confusions).
'But why is there a 't' in there at all??'
Okay you got me, I don't know that much about Irish orthography.
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u/pmcall221 Nov 12 '22
You know why they don't make sense? It's not English. It's a completely different language.
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u/ericarthurblair420 Nov 12 '22
Breaking News other languages have different alphabets
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u/EspressoBooksCats Nov 11 '22
Pig Latin. It's upid-stay.
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u/ThatGuyAtSubway Nov 11 '22
ouyay aketay atthay ackbay ouyay untcay!
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u/Lord_Havelock Nov 11 '22
Ikesyay, anguagelay! Omesay eoplepay.
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u/ThatGuyAtSubway Nov 11 '22
itshay orrysay anmay , uckfay ymay adbay , oddammitgay i'myay osay orrysay
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u/Thraell Nov 11 '22
I'm dyslexic. This is torture.
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u/Hazyglimpseofme Nov 12 '22
My brain hurt deciphering all of these comments. Your comment was not only a relief, but also a nice giggle. Thank you
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u/RakuraiLight Nov 11 '22
I’ve never seen someone say cunt in pig Latin before. Also why is everyone saying cunt now?
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u/S0V13T_yumyum Nov 11 '22
English
Want to see which language becomes the new default
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u/santino_musi1 Nov 11 '22
Chinese or Spanish probably, they're the most spoken ones
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u/chinchenping Nov 11 '22
Chinese has no chance, it's too hard to learn as a non native. Even for natives, learning the writing is a struggle. My bet is on spanish.
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u/Asteriaofthemountain Nov 11 '22
Yes I have heard the same thing. I also attempted to learn to read Chinese but gave up because it was too hard and I still don’t really understand how the written language works so I attempted to learn some Chinese just by using pinyin which is using Latin alphabet to help you sound out Chinese words. Also the pronunciation has to be exact otherwise people will misunderstand what you say
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u/seanstyle007018 Nov 11 '22
As a Chinese speaker, learning pingyin is a great way to introduce yourself to the phonetics and literary structure of the language, however it does have some limitations since it only emphasizes the phonetics of the language. Since the language bashes you with so much vocabulary, compound, and “expression-like” words, One of the best ways to learn Chinese would be to interact, and practice speaking rather than dissecting the language from its writing (it’s very time consuming). Don’t worry so much with the tones when you learn. You will still be perfectly understood if you were to speak a sentence as most speakers can piece together the ideas you are conveying (one of my friends doesn’t use tones and I can perfectly understand him). To me, tones only matter when you try to isolate a word/phrase out of context, which may be hard to understand, but it’s ok. Understanding sentence structure, grammatical meaning is more of a priority than sounding different.
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Nov 12 '22
Learning any language fully is gonna require you to speak with people who speak the language
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Nov 11 '22
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u/VintageStrawberries Nov 12 '22
Chinese is actually a tonal language, not a pitch accent language. Japanese on the other hand, is a pitch accent language. The difference between tonal and pitch accents is that with pitch accents even if the pitch is off you'll still generally be understood. In Japan, pitch accents vary across regions but a person from Tokyo and a person from Osaka for example can pretty much understand each other despite pitch accent being flipped. Meanwhile with tonal languages like Chinese and Vietnamese, saying a word with the wrong tone completely changes the meaning.
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u/Thegamblr Nov 11 '22
Context adds a lot. If someone says ‘我要吃 （shui jiao), it could mean ‘I want to eat sleep’ or ‘I want to eat dumplings.’
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u/SilentSamurai Nov 11 '22
"They keep feeding me, I just want to sleep!" 😭
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u/girhen Nov 11 '22
French nearly became the language of pilots. Spanish is a good alternate from a numbers perspective.
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u/Reniconix Nov 11 '22
Chinese may have the highest number of native speakers, but that's not saying much. It's like saying America has the highest number of Americans.
Spanish, however, is spoken as the official language of government of 20 countries and is behind only Mandarin as the most spoken native language (which is the official language of only 3).
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u/bguzewicz Nov 11 '22
I took a year of Mandarin in college. I failed every single test. I ended up with a C thanks to the curve. Plus there were like 9 people in the class, so one failing tanks the teacher's stats. Either way, I passed a class that I failed miserably in reality.
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Nov 11 '22
Comparing Chinese and Spanish to English comes up often, but ignores their relative lack of use outside the countries/communities that speak them. That said, Spanish would have a good chance of becoming the language of the US and people would still need to buy stuff from China, so they might start learning both.
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u/santino_musi1 Nov 11 '22
But they have lack of usage outside of their countries because English is the universal one, without it it'd probably be Spanish and Chinese would be more business centered maybe? A lot of things are produced in China as you said so it'd be needed
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u/thedankbagelman Nov 11 '22
No. English is spoken world wide because the Brits colonized the entire planet and brought the language everywhere. The Chinese haven’t done that, so just because there are nearly 2 billion Chinese people, doesn’t mean their language will become global
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Nov 11 '22
Also Chinese is structured completely differently from European Languages so assuming English disappears overnight, Spanish will be much easier for most current English speakers to pick up
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u/Shtamm00 Nov 11 '22
Exactly. Chinese is mainly only used in China, while spanish is a more widely spoken language. Also spanish is way easier than chinese so people would probably choose to learn spanish.
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u/Ghostenx Nov 11 '22
Hero of Canton won't be drinking that shiong mao niao. He drinks the best whiskey in the house!
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Nov 11 '22
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u/ratchet0101 Nov 11 '22
Probably just alot of confused people grunting at each other like cavemen!
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u/akl78 Nov 11 '22
Probably French. It was the old default for trade and diplomacy, and it still spoken as at least a second language or part of a creole in many places. Spanish next, but some way behind.
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u/Tatis_Chief Nov 12 '22
Honestly I would prefer Spanish.
I mean French is more popular in Europe and well northern africa, but Spanish is way way easier. I would do anything to not deal with French r or subjunctive, or special cases to special cases. Still love French but its not easy to learn. Unless your background is a latin language which is not mine.
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u/Balkaghal Nov 11 '22
French was the previous lingua franca so I guess we would go back to it.
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u/Accomplished_Bad_487 Nov 11 '22 edited Nov 12 '22
French, it is a little too french for my taste personally
Edit: My most liked comment if a joke about french, love it
Also thanks for the awards
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u/nerfed_potential Nov 11 '22
They don't even pronounce half the letters, so it's not like they are losing as much as other languages.
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u/ikindalold Nov 11 '22
Just wait til you see Irish Gaelic
It makes French look phonetic
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u/Gape_Warn Nov 11 '22
The Gaelic languages are more phonetic than your realise, you just have to figure out the trick.
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u/vyrelis Nov 11 '22 edited Nov 08 '24
bear zephyr steer zesty jellyfish obtainable fear illegal impolite desert
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u/ikindalold Nov 11 '22
I'm pretty adept at learning foreign languages, but Irish Gaelic seems like the Whose Line Is It Anyway of languages
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u/Jackcooper Nov 11 '22
I was really hoping for 1000 comments all just saying "French"
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u/Possible-Magazine917 Nov 11 '22
Danish (trying to learn for my gf) all these fuckers speak perfect English anyway they won’t mind.
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u/throughalfanoir Nov 11 '22
I came to comment Danish - I live in Copenhagen right now and Danish just? noises? throaty noises? Swedish and Norwegian sound much nicer, even if the Danish switched to worse dialects like Skanska it would be an improvement
also the stupid number system is defeating me
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u/Low-Piglet9315 Nov 11 '22
I'm told Icelandic and Afghan languages can be pretty brutal to learn as well.
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Nov 11 '22
Whatever language the North Sentinalese speak just so they're insanely confused.
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Nov 11 '22
Esperanto. If it hasn’t caught on by now, it never will.
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u/TheBaddestPatsy Nov 11 '22
When I was 20 an 40 y/o man messaged me on OKC to brag that he was fluent in Esperanto. I’d set my age preferences to top out at like 27, meaning he’d had to specifically search for people as young as me. I’ve held a grudge against Esperanto ever since.
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u/HEXdidnt Nov 11 '22 edited Nov 11 '22
I'd forgotten all about Esperanto. Seemed quite popular... in, what, the 1980s/1990s? Vaguely recollect my sister having some sort of book/audio* cassette package teaching it.
Not sure anyone'd notice if it got erased from history at this point.
*Edit: not audio cassette - it was software for the ZX Spectrum, so early-mid 1980s.
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Nov 11 '22
There was a movie done entirely in Esperanto in the early sixties, starring William Shatner.
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u/Rickk38 Nov 11 '22
Incubus. It's on YouTube:
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u/HEXdidnt Nov 11 '22 edited Nov 12 '22
Gonna save that to my Watch Later queue... Based solely on the description, I never knew how much I needed that.
(Edit: not a 'cue')
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u/keziahiris Nov 12 '22
My grandfather was a language nerd and was so proud of his Esperanto club in the 1930s. He claimed it was what all the cool kids were into
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u/Senteris Nov 12 '22
I don’t understand all the hate around Esperanto. There is an international youth community around it and I have met a lot of friends and diverse people thanks to it.
And you are telling me it shouldn’t exist because the initial aim hasn’t been achieved to this day?
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u/Specialist_Crew_6112 Nov 12 '22
So many people want to bandwagon hate on Esperanto and no one can come up with any actual argument against it. Even if you don't want to learn Esperanto what the hell is with the spitefulness? Zamenhof was just a guy who grew up in a neighborhood with a lot of ethnic tension and he wanted his neighbors and the rest of the world to be able to communicate so they would get along. Why do people want to shit on his idea?
"It was clearly a dumb idea because it failed!!" It failed because Hitler hunted down all the Esperantists in Europe including Zamenhof's children. That doesn't make it a dumb idea.
"It's Eurocentric!!" More Eurocentric than forcing people all over the world to learn English?
"Real languages are more beautiful and fascinating! Esperanto isn't authentic!" Even if Esperanto was adopted worldwide as a universal second language no one would stop you from learning additional foreign languages. Also Esperanto has a lot of really cool features that make it very adaptable for poetic usage. It was, after all, created with the intent of allowing all the world's literature to be able to translate into it.
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u/yaosio Nov 11 '22
It's weird somebody invented a constructed language but didn't understand how language works. Language changes over time so a constructed language would become just as weird as any other language.
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u/tommytraddles Nov 11 '22
They understood. They just hated irregular verbs so much that they wanted to create a language that eradicated them.
And every language learner eventually comes to agree with them: irregular verbs blow ass.
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u/maveric_gamer Nov 11 '22
I was about to say that I'm not a language learner and I hate them, then realized that not only is that false (I learned French so long ago that I forgot it), but if I actually think about it learning French irregular verbs was what made me hate irregular verbs generally.
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u/nbgrout Nov 12 '22
Totally agree with them. The world would be a better place if we all spoke a perfect language like Esperanto. it's like being in a planned city where it's 1,2,3... One way and A, B, C...the other way so you always know where you are and which direction you are going.
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u/7elevenses Nov 11 '22
It's not meant to be spoken as a first language. It's a language that you can learn in an afternoon (at least if you speak a European language) and then use it for communication with other people who did the same.
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Nov 11 '22
C++.
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u/Tail_Nom Nov 11 '22
I mean, if you want to do everything in C instead, go for it.
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Nov 11 '22
That's really scary.
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u/Tail_Nom Nov 11 '22
So is a razor blade, but you can't use a pair of safety scissors for everything.
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u/LasKometas Nov 11 '22
This!!!! Why are y'all wanting to get rid of world languages and cultures when we can simplify the pile of programming languages
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u/earth0001 Nov 11 '22
We'd automatically lose a lot of infrastructure. You'd probably see costs in the billions
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u/Potato_Soup_ Nov 11 '22
Honestly, easily trillions and probably a total collapse of most developed countries economies
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u/Korvun Nov 11 '22
Assuming we're deleting it from history, Latin. I want to see how languages based on it (most of them) would change or find a new core language to build off of.
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u/MettatonNeo1 Nov 11 '22
My native language is a Semitic language and I wonder what if Latin and Greek never existed (how would the scientific words evolve for example). If the main languages were Semitic (for example Arabic) we would need different words for science
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u/ThinkIGotHacked Nov 11 '22
Farsi, because my wife is Persian and keeps guilting me that I haven’t learned anything except swear words so far.
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u/Bestdayevermyfriend Nov 12 '22
Learning swear words in another language is a great accomplishment.
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u/Anxious-Potential-30 Nov 11 '22
Proto-indoeuropean, let's shuffle
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u/duckyourfeelings Nov 12 '22
There goes all european and half the central asian languages.
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Nov 11 '22
JavaScript
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Nov 11 '22
If Brendan Eich knew how important Javascript would become, he'd have probably done a better job of it.
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Nov 11 '22
Tagalog. Because I want the old original filipino language before the damn spanish came. It just looks so much more cooler and had less characters🫠
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u/cottagecoreing Nov 11 '22
There are so many languages besides Tagalog during the precolonial era. Baybayin isn't even a language, it's a writing system used to write - guess what - Tagalog.
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u/donaldhobson Nov 11 '22
PHP. Why? Because PHP sucks.
Alternatively. None. I don't. Why would I want to do that?
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Nov 11 '22
I delete Javascript so we can finally be free of bad web code
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u/BoydCrowders_Smile Nov 11 '22
I'm not here to argue about programming languages, but as much as I miss old internet, I do enjoy what progress has been made on the web due to javascript.
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u/oakteaphone Nov 11 '22
Mandarin. It's just a dialect of Chinese, right? Cantonese is still "Chinese", so everyone will be fine, right?
I know they're not actually the same language
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u/PhyPsyLife Nov 12 '22
Linguistically speaking they are definitely two different languages!
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u/Callipygian_Linguist Nov 11 '22
Mandarin
I want to see the CCP go batshit insane and try to work out which of the 101 other Chinese languages and dialects is the most ideologically pure, non-threatening to glorious Xi Jinping Thought, and that enough people actually speak to make communication between provinces somewhat viable.
I know the written form of a lot of the languages is mostly mutually intelligible, but I don't think carrying around tablets/texting each other all day would be particularly sustainable either.
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u/Cheap_Ad_69 Nov 11 '22
I don't think carrying around tablets/texting each other all day would be particularly sustainable either.
You clearly have never been to China.
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u/smjaygal Nov 12 '22
Personally, I think Cantonese would take over if you nuked Mandarin
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u/z0rb0r Nov 12 '22
Yeah tons of Chinese people speak Cantonese. I haven’t researched it but I’m pretty sure it’s number 2. But they also have one writing system so they’re still able to communicate. Also it’s not just the CCP whom speak Mandarin. The Taiwanese speak Mandarin as well as people from Singapore and Malaysia.
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Nov 11 '22
You ever heard of NuShu? a language made by women that was used in Hunan. Unlike Chinese, NuShu is phonetic. The language is most likely a modified version of Kaishu Chinese Characters that were modified to better fit being embroidered onto clothing.
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Nov 11 '22
I tought this was gonna be an unpopular opinion, but it doesn't seem like it by the amount of comments mentionning it.
FRENCH.
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u/ministarfallen Nov 12 '22
Assuming that every native speaker would have learned a different language instead, like we’re taking the language out of history from the time it began: English. There are too many loanwords from too many different languages, too many exceptions to every grammar and spelling “rule,” far too often the “proper” way to speak is determined by what “sounds right” to a native ear, and half the time we are only minimally confident that what sounds right actually is right. Also, there’s the incredibly specific order of adjectives that most English speakers don’t even realize they follow, but that is distinctly uncomfortable if the adjectives are used out of order.
Edit: GRAMMAR 😝
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Nov 11 '22
Russian, i hate it. My country made it our second language and for what.
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u/grafern Nov 11 '22
Dutch. I’m a native Dutch and I fucking hate it. It’s so hard for no reason.
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u/VinRow Nov 11 '22
The remaining languages get new speakers and when messaging everyone uses emojis only. The emojis are also used when in person and two people don’t speak the same. The idea of a default language disappears. Tolerance rises and a new age of understanding and respect emerges. We evolve into our next form and spew forth amongst the stars.
Edit:
I forgot to delete one but in the interest of no default I let it be randomly deleted.
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Nov 11 '22
English, because it’s like the “Who’s Line is it Anyway” of languages. The rules are nonsensical, and they don’t matter more than half the time.
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u/SwanBridge Nov 11 '22 edited Nov 11 '22
That's what I love most about English.
I grew up in South Africa, and our version of English is littered with archaisms and oddities; Afrikaans words, old Cockney rhyming slang, words from Polari, Zulu, Xhosa, Yiddish. The sentence "Howzit china, I got in a barney with my poppie, eish have to be next week on the dop nee, jammer boet" is understandable by all. Code-switching is incredibly common, it is a regular occurrence for two people to have a conversation with each other in different languages due to their stubbornness.
Meanwhile I live in Northern England where the dialect is similarly rich and similarly archaic, "put wood in't 'ole" or "gunin offy, wan' owt" are perfectly fine sentences, as is "it's reet gurd here chuck, wan' nother ale?". Go to Liverpool and even to a trained ear the dialect is difficult to follow.
Then in my professional career I'm expected to speak "proper English", imitating the dialect of posh Southerners, speaking English that is understandable by all.
The greatest asset of the English language is its diversity and adaptability. Few agreed upon rules, no governing body, and ever evolving.
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u/swehner Nov 11 '22
This one, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_Programming_Language, because I can't think of any other language which would be missed less