Language teacher

If you search Google for “language teacher” (מורה ללשון) in Hebrew, the autocompletion suggests “language teacher killed herself” (מורה ללשון התאבדה). The word “teacher” is spelled the same for both genders, but the verb is feminine. I don’t know why does it happen, because actually searching for it doesn’t yield anything significant.

In Israeli schools where Hebrew is the medium of teaching, “Language” is the class where the grammar of Hebrew is taught… badly.

Japanese, Germans and Israelis of the world

Through i-iter i came upon this interesting post: Tamil, Kannada and the middle path. Tamil and Kannada are two important languages spoken in the south of India and their speakers are quite proud of their identity.

The article complains that not enough is being done for the linguistic normalization of non-Hindi languages in India. It was very interesting to read it and, being Israeli, i was surprised to see the compliments to “Japanese, Germans and Israelis of the world who aren’t wasting time tom-toming about antiquity, beauty or originality, but are instead investing their time, money and energy in using their languages for almost all known purposes”.

I was curious – why did they choose these three? Why not Russians and French, who use their languages for everything because many of them openly consider them to be better than all the others? Why not Catalans, whose language is in a political situation which is much more similar to that of Tamil and Kannada?

And why Israelis? Sure, we use Hebrew a lot; Hebrew Wikipedia, for example, is our pride. But i don’t think that we use Hebrew enough. For example, a lot of people (not all) write email in English. They write email in English even if they don’t know English well. They write email in English even though practically all the technical problems with encoding and bi-directionality were solved years ago. And they write email in English even if the email is about a topic for which Hebrew is perfectly suitable: one could argue that English is more convenient for writing about software or physics, but quite a lot of people write email in English just to to tell recent family news or to make an appointment.

I used to do that, too, but i made a conscious decision to stop writing email in English unless it is absolutely necessary. I tell all my friends about it. Some of them are indifferent and some of them – especially those in the software industry – say that Israel should have adopted English and not Hebrew as its language. Shame on them. Students think that i know English well, so they often ask me what is the most polite way to make an appointment with their professors in English, and i always tell them: “If your professor can read Hebrew, just write the email in Hebrew!”

Of course, there’s also the matter of university papers. In physics, for example, even though Hebrew is used in classroom, it goes for granted that papers at M.A.-level and higher are written only in English. The need for an English version is understandable, because in the world scale very few people would be able to read a paper in Hebrew, but i would imagine that it’s much better to write the paper in Hebrew and translate it. Yes, it would take time and probably money, but it is nevertheless useful and not just for the honor of the Hebrew language: it would actually advance science and education, because this way people would express themselves in their own language and think about physics instead of thinking about English.

Finally, there’s Facebook. For some reason many Israelis still use Facebook with the English interface – again, even though they don’t know English well, and even though they never read or write anything in English there. The translation of Facebook into Hebrew is terrible, and what’s especially frustrating is that i would gladly fix it, but i can’t, because the interface for submitting translation corrections is absolutely unusable. I nevertheless use Facebook in Hebrew, because it solves the bi-directionality problems – for example, the notorious problem with the punctuation marks appearing at the wrong end of the sentence. There was a newspaper report saying that Facebook influences Israeli children so much that they got used to writing the question mark at the beginning of the sentence – and that’s how they submit their homework! Some Israelis develop weird tricks to make the punctuation appear on the correct side of the sentence, for example by adding a letter after the period – compare “אתה בא לכדורגל בערב?י” and “אתה בא לכדורגל בערב?” – notice the placement of the question mark and the redundant letter in the first sentence. But they could simply switch to Hebrew. (And one day i will write an email to Facebook offices and tell them that they really should improve the translation.)

It’s quite pleasing to see that speakers of Kannada look up to us, but it doesn’t mean that we already did all we could to normalize Hebrew.

(And why am i writing this in English? Because i started writing it as a comment for that blog and it grew into a post by itself.)

Kas buvo tai nebus

In the last couple of years i fell in love with Israeli literature, especially poetry – from Y. L. Gordon, H. N. Bialik and S. Chernihovski, through N. Alterman and J. Amihay all the way to the present days’ M. Arad and D. Manor. Because of this – among some other things – i decided to study for a minor degree in Hebrew and not in Chinese.

In school i learned about Israel’s poetry like this: There was a literature teacher. We started to study Bialik. She said: “There are common meters – amphibrach, anapaest, iambus, dactyl, and so on, and according to the program you are supposed to study them now, but it is hard for you, and i am not in the mood, so we won’t do it.” She hardly even mentioned Chernihovsky, Shlonsky, Alterman and Avidan – they are, according to her, also “hard, and you can do fine without them”. And so i received the reasonable 75 grade in the matriculation exam in literature in an Israeli high school, but in fact hardly studied any Hebrew literature at all, and for nearly ten years after the school didn’t read a single Israeli book, and not much foreign ones, either.

So now i am replenishing this. At the university i was quickly taught the basics of poetic meters and devices, and suddenly realized what a terrible crime that teacher committed. Without understanding these mostly simple rules it is very hard to read poetry. And he who learns them a little, becomes more educated and opens for himself a new exciting world.

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The complete collected works of David Avidan are being released these days. I saw the book in the shop and thought – to buy or not buy? Previously, Avidan seemed very hard for me. I looked through a few pages and understood – now i’ll be able to enjoy it. I looked at the table of contents and all of a sudden saw a title of a poem in Latin letters, and not in English – “Kas buvo tai nebus”. It seemed familiar, i thought that it was Latin, but no, obviously not Latin. And after a moment i realized that it was in Lithuanian: “What was, shall not be”. Here is an attempt in translation:

Two Lithuanians, remembering their mother tongue
Less than they remember
Their mother, meet in a cool evening
In an open coffee house and begin
Remembering. How does one say
The past in Lithuanian? Really, how does one say
The past in Lithuanian? Very awkward, indeed
Very uncomfortable. Maybe there is
Someone here in this nice environment, within a radius of a
Kilometer or two who will be able to fix
This depressing linguistic short circuit? But
The time is very late, and all
The Lithuanians, who arentdeadyet are already asleep.

How does one say sleep in Lithuanian?

1964

(The poem may have been already translated into English, maybe even by Avidan himself. As for “arentdeadyet” – Avidan often stuck words together as a literary device.)

I don’t know what prompted Avidan to write such an unusual poem. Lithuanians, as far as i know, preserved their language much better than did most peoples of the USSR. But perhaps he spoke of the Lithuanians in America or in Israel.

But i bought the book, of course.

Regular expressions

I love regular expressions. I cannot live without regular expressions. I cannot understand how people can go on with their lives without using at least one regular expression every couple of hours. I don’t understand why schools teach algebra instead of regular expressions. I didn’t use any algebra in my life, ever. I used a lot of regular expressions and it is not less mathematical.

is perl still worth learning

Someone entered “is perl still worth learning” into a search engine and found my blog.

The answer is Yes.

Python and Ruby are not inherently bad, but Perl is at least as useful and modern as them, it has – arguably – a wonderful community of programmers, it has an amazing library of reusable modules called CPAN.

My wife Hadar is starting serious work on her PhD in physics in the Technion. The guys in the lab in which she will be working wrote some calculations software in Fortran on Windows. The first thing that Hadar is doing is deciphering this Fortran code. She asked me for some help, and i couldn’t provide much, because i don’t really know Fortran. I suggested that she will advise those lab guys to consider porting their software, at least for the future, to Perl, because it is portable and because it is quite possible that it has the same capabilities for mathematical and scientific work as Fortran has. She told it to one of the researchers there and he replied that it should not be done, because “Perl is just a language for network servers.”

Saying that “Perl is just a language for network servers” is pretty much like saying that all Russian women are prostitutes. It’s a sad and silly prejudice. Here’s an article that dispels it: Ten Perl Myths.

So Hadar learned a little Perl and PDL – the Perl library for advanced mathematics. She picked up the basics very quickly. I was pleasantly surprised that she found that Perl’s main data types are scalars ($drug = 'caffeine') and arrays (@drugs = ('marijuana', 'quaalude', 'paracetamol')), because in math it works the same way (we didn’t discuss hashes yet). I was even more surprised to learn that it seemed perfectly fine to her that @drugs is an array, but to access ‘quaalude’ you need to write $drugs[2] and not @drugs[2]. We tried searching CPAN for various mathematical functions, such as eigenvalue, matrix diagonal and linear algebra, and found everything.

So she’s gonna try that.

If she can’t convince them to migrate to Perl, i’ll have to learn Fortran and try to help them migrate from a Windows version of Fortran to GNU Fortran.

Binary

I program for living, but i’ve never received proper formal education in serious algorithms.

Here’s a very simple problem: Take an array of length n and fill it with zeros. Every array member represents a binary digit. Now, using this array and not using the usual math for binary conversion, print all binary digits from zero to the maximum binary number with n digits. For example, with n == 3 this should be printed:

0 0 0
0 0 1
0 1 0
0 1 1
1 0 0
1 0 1
1 1 0
1 1 1

Here’s what i wrote. Is it OK or is it an embarrassment?

use strict;
use warnings;

# That's right, upgrade to Perl 5.10.
# If you can't, comment out this line.
use 5.010;

my $digits = $ARGV[0] // 3;

# /If you don't have Perl 5.10, use this:
# my $digits = defined $ARGV[0] ? $ARGV[0] : 3;

my @matrix = ();
my @number = map { 0 } (1 .. $digits);
my $last = 0;

NUMBER:
while (not $last) {
    push @matrix, [ @number ];

    my $digit_index = $digits;
    DIGIT:
    while ($digit_index) {
        $digit_index--;
        $last = 1;

        if ($number[$digit_index]) {
            $number[$digit_index] = 0;
        }
        else {
            $last = 0;
            $number[$digit_index] = 1;
          next NUMBER;
        }
    }
}

foreach my $number (@matrix) {
    print "@{$number}\n";
}

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Oh (edit): The real embarrassment – in WordPress the sourcecode presentation cannot display Perl properly. But if i put ‘ruby’ instead of ‘perl’ in the language attribute, it works mostly fine …

I Gotta Move

Oh no.

He came from my home town
He was a prophet
Some kids they put him in the ground
Got coffee
Got donuts
Got wasted
Erased head
And what do they say?
He’s not afraid of the present tense
And talking back is a bad defense
I gotta move
I gotta break
I gotta get me cross the lake
I gotta move

Bother.

Blaise P.

This is not a “People speaking” entry. And, hopefully, not a self-indulgent bragging entry.

— “Amir, did you learn Visual Basic .NET in the university?”

— “No. I learned VB.NET here, at this project that i’m doing now.”

— “And where did you study the old Visual Basic?”

— “I wrote many macros for Microsoft Word and Excel in Visual Basic.”

— “And C#?”

— “I learned C# at this project too.”

— “I want to learn C#. And C++. C# is just a new version of C++, right?”

— “Not exactly – they are different languages, but they are in the same family and their basic syntax is very similar.”

— “And is VB.NET a new version of the old Visual Basic?”

— “Yes, but Microsoft made a lot of changes in the syntax of the advanced parts, such as types, classes, objects, inheritance, controls, and stuff like that.”

— “Oh, yeah … That’s exactly the part that I don’t understand at all. I guess that I should learn it.”

If you are not a programmer, “that part” is called “Object-Oriented Programming”, OOP for short, and it is one of the most important concepts in the world of software since the late 1980′s.

At this point in the conversation i suddenly realized that i have never studied Object-Oriented Programming. I also realized that the biggest programming project that i’ve ever done all by myself was in high school. It was a project for which i received a bonus grade in my final school certificate (“bagrut”). Functionally it was a database of pupils in extra-curricular school activities.

Technically it was a pretty big Pascal program. I don’t remember how many lines of code it had, but i guess that there were at least a few thousands; i did have to break it up to several files (“modules”). It had a DOS’ish text based menu interface – almost a GUI, written using the wonderful Turbo Vision library, which apparently still exists today as free software.

To use Turbo Vision i had to learn Object-Oriented Programming and most of the concepts of Software Design and even System Analysis. I studied using books, completely by myself (except the stupid DFD diagrams, which looked hard, so i got some help from my high school Computers teacher; but he admitted at some point that they seem hard mostly because they are not so useful and allowed me to omit them from the project).

Now here’s the scary part: A year later i studied OOP at Programming Course in IDF. I’m not sure that i would understand it as well – if at all – had i not learned it earlier from a book.

And this is the point – for me self-study from books is nearly always better than classes.

In a class i feel that being there is enough. I mean come on! I woke up early, i went all the way to the school, i sat there for hours – what else do i have to do? Homework? Self-study?? I studied OOP from a book for the fun of it when i was sixteen. I am absolutely sure that i would understand it just as well if i would read it when i was nine.

When i am thinking about it this way, it seems that dragging children from the age of six all the way to to eighteen through all those classes in school is terrible dictatorship. It seems that it is done for a good cause, but it seems disastrously ineffective and possibly destructive.

But maybe that’s just me.