I wouldn't suggest going for a recent X1 as there are some driver issues on Linux.
My current one is a Thinkpad 14s AMD. As somebody who had most smaller Thinkpads and Dells in the last 15 years, this is my favourite machine so far: great battery, a decent GPU, still a Thinkpad, perfect Linux support.
I have T14s Gen 3 AMD for almost 2 years now, Linux support is great and it's the best laptop I've ever owned. It wasn't the latest model at the time of purchase, I got it off Ebay sale.
Lisp doesnt have much syntax to speak of. All of the DSLs use the same basic structure and are easy to read.
Cpp has A LOT A of syntax: init rules, consts, references, move, copy, templates, special cases, etc. It also includes most of C, which is small but has so many basic language design mistakes that "C puzzles" is a book.
The syntax and the concepts (const, move, copy, etc) are orthogonal. You could possibly write a lisp / s-exp syntax for c++ and all it would make better would be the macros in the preprocessor. The DSL doesn't have to be hard to read if it uses unfamiliar/uncommon project specific concepts.
What i mean is that in cpp all the numerous language features are exposed through little syntax/grammar details. Whereas in Lisps syntax and grammar are primitive, and this is why macros work so well.
It seems that proper vectorization requires a different kind of language, something similar to cuda and the like, not a general putpose scalar kind of language.
I remember intel had something like it but it went nowhere.
Hebrew was literally synthesised a century ago. Language designers really did great work on taking a core of a dead language and proposing a cleaner, more modern version of it.
Russian and English never had this "rearchitecture-and-cleanup" moment. In fact, English borrows heavily from different languages (old german, old danish, latin, old french...) adding even more complexity. Russian borrows from greek, old slavonic (bolgarian), among others. So an advanced speaker/reader of these languages has to understand the influences.
A couple of years ago I tried learning some minimal Ancient egyptian. A fascinating language in its diversity. Middle kingdom egyptian, old and new kingdom written dialects. Then, there's a simplified cursive script which almost feels like modern writing.
Hebrew wasn’t “literally synthesised” and wasn’t dead. Jews have continuously been writing and publishing works in Hebrew for the past 2,000 years.
It has evolved naturally to some extent over that time, but much less than other languages - a modern Hebrew speaker can more easily understand medieval Hebrew than an English speaker Medieval English.
What has been synthesised a century ago is additional vocabulary for modern concepts, and this is ongoing for Hebrew as it is for every other language.
Yeah, the story is quite a bit more involved than that.
I don't know much beyond the story of Perelman consolidating Hebrew grammar and dictionary, and having problems with popularizing the old-new language initially.
The point was that other modern languages never had a chance to get this kind of clean up.
I had heard somewhere that much of the vocabulary of Modern Hebrew consists of loanwords from Arabic. Is this correct and if so, would it mean that the "cleanliness" of the language is more a reflection of Modern Standard Arabic?
Apologies in advance if this is seen as some falsehood or if it's a sensitive topic.
I couldn't find a source for how many Hebrew words have each origin, so I sampled 25 random words from the Hebrew Wiktionary and counted their sources. Where there wasn't a clear source (or a clear "way" to a source) or the word itself was spelled in English for some reason I just randomized another word.
The number one source was unsurprisingly Hebrew with 11 words. This includes biblical sources as well as medieval and more modern sources, typically Jewish scholars writing in Hebrew in exile.
The second most common source was Greek with 5 words and relatedly Latin had 1 word. A lot of them you'd probably recognize in many languages e.g. whatever way you say Democracy probably has the same origin (sounds like Demokratia in Hebrew).
The third most common source was ancient Hebrew-adjacent languages, 2 for Aramaic, 1 for Ugaritic, 1 for Akkadian. You could include the 2 for Arabic here as well.
The fourth would be modern loanwords with 1 for English and 1 for Italian ("Pizzeria").
It is also worth noting that some words with a foreign origin still have a Hebrew counterpart. For example דיאלוג==Dialog==Dialogue is not from Hebrew, but you can say דו-שיח instead.
Additionally, Wiktionary does slightly bias towards the words you'd want to look up and is not as comprehensive as a real dictionary, so not a perfect sampling.
My personal guess is that this isn't too far off of reality. A more comprehensive sampling will probably diversify the various European languages rather than just being Greek (i.e. probably a bit more German via Yiddish, a bit of French etc.) and maybe make Aramaic a bit more prominent, but overall it doesn't feel insanely off base.
No, that isn't true. Hebrew has taken a lot of Arabic words but not the majority. It has also taken a lot from Yiddish (as you'd expect) and certain modern words which are common across Europe.
>Russian and English never had this "rearchitecture-and-cleanup" moment.
Then 1918th spelling reform was a thing. It's of course always easier to reform other languages to make it closer to yours than change yourself. Those silly natives can't ever figure out the spelling and dictionary themselves without a bit of a genocide.
Add baltic languages to the mix as well! Lithuanian is like a slavic language with all the inflection drama but with additional word types that are currently mostly gone from slavic languages.
Well, Lithuanian is also a Proto-Indo-European language. But the one that somehow got sucked into a time warp from the past. And it even has a tonal pitch accent in addition to the stress pattern, just to make it more interesting.
It's not a "proto-indo-european"! It did change, and change massively. But it seems that because of how the number of native speakers was always low, and thr populayion was concentrated in a relatively isolated part of Europe, this evolution was more self-contained and reflective.
The language seems to have more archaic features and forms than, say, closely related slavic languages, and its vocabulary has more similarities to old sanscrit than one's average european language.
For curios language learners this means that the grammar is harder than even (already hard enough) slavic grammars.
Wow, I had no idea. This sounds extremely interesting. I need to read more about Lithuanian language (at least grammar, sadly I don't have time to learn yet another language)
Only somewhat related: I was surprised by how simple and sound vietnamese grammar is when read through the latin alphabet. Tones are only a problem when speaking but it's increadibly easy to start understanding signs and labels in the country. Slavic and baltic languages i can read are MUCH harder to start with.
So i kind of suspect it might also be the case for chinese: tones and the alphabet are obscuring a clean grammar.
Conveying what I've heard from a few Vietnamese that also speak Chinese, so not any kind of firsthand experience since I speak neither: Vietnamese is more difficult to speak but is a simpler (less expressive) language.
I agree that written Vietnamese is relatively straightforward. It isn't that difficult to read to the eyes of someone used to latin script.
What is also interesting is how written Russian was heavily influenced by old Bulgarian. In fact, written russian includes a lot of older written bulgarian vocabulary.
This results in a weird paradox: for literate Russians it is easy enough to read written bulgarian but almost impossible to understand the spoken language.
This happens in other languages too - danish and Norwegian are almost the same written, such that most products just combine the two on the packaging. But spoken it can be very difficult to comprehend
So... codified written languages are similar but real spoken ones have diverged? Is this only in the way things are pronouced or the differemce is deeper?
Computer languages are much simpler than human languages, and they also operate in similar kind of logical ways. I definitely remember how hard was to go from pascal to C to Cpp to Python to prolog to haskell to SQL... until at some point nothing was new.
To me, working with a computer language involves specific thinking, constructing stuff in my mind. But human language is nothing of the sort, though it's possible to kind of do the same if I sit down and try to polish a written sentence.
But talking in, and understanding a conversation is as far from this as I can imagine. And the learning process is so extremely different.
He also never watched Lock, Stock and 2 Smoking Barrels.
And Half-life is just something-something-let-me-check.
Oh, well...
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