with a question so how many of you have
ever taken a career assessment it’s one
of these tests that will tell you
whether you’re good at math or good at
language whether you should choose a
career in engineering I suspect many of
you have I was talking to a friend about
this the other day and he told me then
that when he took it it came out that
his ideal career was as a plumber so I
think I think a lot of ink has been
wasted in trying to determine what these
tests really say about us I think the
answer is really very simple it’s all
about learning it’s all about how we
take in and absorb information so in
this room I suspect most of you would be
kind of on the language side of the
spectrum but even among you there would
there would be so important differences
if we compare one culture against
another will find that the differences
are starker still so much so that the
stereotype of the German engineer or the
French poet seemed very true to type
it’s as if our gut is telling us that
there’s there’s some truth there
sometimes it happens that a culture
develops such a deep understanding and
knowledge about a particular field that
they kind of extend it in new ways and
they sort of after carving out that
space they plant their flag there and
their spoken language becomes the basis
in terms of which the the rest of us get
to talk about what they created so for
the longest time if you wanted to learn
about philosophy you had to learn
ancient Greek even if it wasn’t the
ancient Greek the Greek itself that you
were after if you wanted to understand
the ideas in philosophy you had to go
through this language in order to get to
them to you know in order to be able to
access them now today we see a much more
commonplace example of this in in social
media so these are posts in Spanish
speaking social media and then but there
are these English words
of there trying to kind of poking
through from the background so things
like likes and posts sometimes
conjugated in weird and interesting ways
I just kind of mixed in there and oh
yeah and of course there are the cats in
the poem now what about the not so much
the consumption of media but the
creation of it well it turns out that
there we really don’t have any choice
the flag has been planted programming is
an expression of language and the
language that we are talking about here
is the English language for those of us
that are here that speaker the good news
is that you’re a good part of the way
towards learning how to program if
that’s something you should like to do
it’s not quite so great for most of the
most of the people in the world a
language that is not English and that
might not even be a Western European
language of that same tradition however
the entire world is kind of moving
towards a place where in our daily lives
that really doesn’t matter so much if I
share a picture on Instagram and I write
a comment I kind of expect that there’s
going to be a translate button somewhere
there so that my friends that speak
another language can understand what I’m
saying language differences matter less
and less in our daily lives when we talk
about programming though about the means
of creation of technology we are kind of
stuck in a different world when we’re
not it’s not only monolingual English
it’s also kind of mono cultural and the
two things really do go together
language is is is culture so we should
really question having to include a
language and a culture as a means to an
end now the end of course is producing
solutions technology is more and more
pervasive in our daily lives it’s in our
cars in our homes soon in in our own
bodies so controlling how we how we
create and having more and more people
access the means of production of
technology is the really important thing
this is a device produced by a friend of
mine but it’s a seeing eye for blind
people
and it works through ultrasound it was
produced here this was not about
corporations it was not about taking
over the world with new technology it
was about somebody that Jeffrey the
Creator knew that he wanted to help out
luckily his English is very good he
posted on on Twitter in English but how
many other Jeffrey’s are out there here
and in in the rest of the world that are
after new solutions to problems that
they see every day and are faced with
this tremendous amount of baggage to
that they’ll have to go through in order
to get to create what they’re looking to
do is there an alternate alternate
reality is there is it plausible to
think of a world where a different
culture I kind of invented the same
thing but in a different way so today
we’re going to look at a culture that is
just about as unlike Western cultures as
I can possibly think and we’re going to
ask what if the Maya had created
programming did they even have from what
we know of their mathematics and their
language did they have the tools at
their disposal to make this happen so
it’s natural to start when we’re talking
about the Maya with mathematics a field
where they were vastly ahead of their
time consider for instance their
independent discovery of zero combined
with a base 20 system much like our
modern mathematical notation this means
that they had access to a full numbered
line they could count backwards and
record historical events that happened
thousands of years prior and project
well into the future so that somewhere
hidden in the in the jungle there’s
likely a stone tablet with an
inscription describing a comment or a
solar eclipse that still have it hasn’t
happened yet today it’s likely because
of their advanced mathematics that the
Maya were able to produce a calendar
that is in many ways more accurate even
than the one we use today it’s perhaps
because of their advanced math that the
Maya were able to produce a cow
under which is in some ways more
accurate than the one we used even today
in fact there’s not only one calendar
the Maya used many calendars which
together enabled them to assess the
length of a month and a solar year so
that it’s exactly congruent with modern
scientific observations and it didn’t
depend on a kind of accretion of changes
in a very ad hoc manner in the way that
the Western calendar did so for example
leap years and arbitrary Corrections
whenever a new pope came came in the
scene none of these are there in the
Mayan calendar which is what I think it
points to a really interesting feature
of the entire culture it’s kind of
synthetic and just so in that they
arrived at expressions that cut across
mathematics astronomy history and many
other fields and then just have this air
of perfection to them it’s really quite
interesting and for sure more than
sufficient to to base a programming
language on now what about language
although architecture and literature and
books sometimes reach us in incomplete
ways language is the the truth temple
that every culture builds and is carried
forward through the generations the
Mayan language as its spoken even today
it has about 30 vowel sounds so a
handful more than English however some
things like the the grammar the word
order and the absence of cases and
conjugation are very much like English
what I think it’s perhaps most
interesting about languages from this
continent is an interesting dichotomy
where they are rarely based on the eye
so me or myself
they are usually languages that talk
about the collective indeed one of the
languages in this continent the Aymara
is completely missing that tends
altogether it just doesn’t does not
exist so they say there’s no I in team
well there’s definitely no I and I
mother so which I mean even thinking
about what this means is kind of a
little bit honestly beyond what I’m able
to to imagine but I can tell you this
just from working in in software for
many years this distinction between the
individual and the collective the eye on
the collective is emblematic of the
struggle over the last 20 or 30 years to
get to where we are today so we are
transitioning from a world that is all
about single machines single lines of
code executed in sequence into a world
where we have many machines talking to
each other systems like Bitcoin and
etherium that are not about one there’s
not a singular there anywhere it’s all
it’s all about the collective so it kind
of makes you wonder if programming was
based on an entirely different tradition
would we have ended up where where we
are now would we have avoided some of
the detours along the way it’s worth
thinking about but regardless there’s
more than enough in Mayan languages to
build a programming language on so this
would be just an interesting thought
experiment if if it was just a
hypothetical but in in actual fact
although most of the people most people
don’t know about this there’s already
there are already many different
programming languages kind of out there
on the fringe of the mainstream
tradition that are non English and this
is one of them this one is kind of a
world in unto itself you know you can
program in Minecraft by placing blocks
and connecting them to each other and
and in this virtual reality world now if
that’s not the most sci-fi thing I have
ever said in my life I don’t know what
is here is another one this is a
language called Piett and you program it
by placing blocks of colors next to each
other and it’s both the colors and the
relationship with one color to the the
other that gives this its meaning so
this is executable code this is code
that’s understandable by a by a computer
I don’t I don’t understand it but it’s
executable and great for somebody who
has a kind of visual mind rather than a
language mind that learns in that way
one of my favorites is called
Shakespeare the Shakespeare programming
language it kind of kind of reads in
this very verbose way but has some
special instructions that will be
interpreted by a computer so when it
says enter Hamlet and Romeo that means
something to the to the computer and at
the end speak your mind I think it means
print something out on the screen I’m
not quite sure what all this stuff in
the middle is saying there are many non
English programming languages in the
world all put together they’re only a
fraction of the total in existence i’m
happy to announce today that will we
will be adding to this list a new
programming language based on Mayan
language and mayan culture which is also
the first new world entirely new world
programming language in it in existence
the target is to use it as a to lower
the barriers of entry into programming
for people who have that tradition this
is one way it could look like so using
some of the grammar this is another
example which is entirely non non verbal
it would use strings and colors and
patterns and the relationship of one to
the other in order to create a meaning
so exciting though they says we’re still
left with a big question why does the
entire world not run like this why is it
that we have this monolingual mono
cultural tradition in the means of
production of Technology even though we
can use it how in whichever language
wee-wee please are we really saying that
this is a foregone conclusion that this
is a necessary fact is there in other
words is the production in the
production in the digital world going to
be all the same all done in one way or
is there a future where we have many
ways of producing and really there’s
only one reason why we should consider
having only one and it has nothing to do
with computers and everything to do with
people in order to build something
complex and useful we need to speak to
our peers some of which are in other
countries as we said before though since
what we’re talking about is verbal
communication this is actively changing
at the moment there are companies out
there with a specific mission to make
the barriers between people and between
cultures kind of go away so on facebook
using virtual reality we’re not quite
sure where this is going to end up but
in all
likelihood the kind of people side of
the equation is about to be bridged and
the future looks a little bit like The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the galaxy where
there is a there’s this there’s a Babel
Fish and it’s something you put in your
ear so that it doesn’t matter which
language somebody else is speaking
you’ll hear something that is just right
for you and your worldview this is why I
think through the extension of this from
social media into social coding were
about to see we’re about to enter a new
era where we’re about to see the true
democratization in digital creation and
the Maya will be there ahead of their time again thank