The reporter said the video was taken before it opened, so of course there was no traffic. It's pretty busy a few months later as shown in this video: https://youtu.be/YOkW2h2HTD8
You might try naming your functions in Chinese. There's evidence showing that people take advantage of the face recognition machinery of their brains to read Chinese[1].
Coincidentally, native speakers of tonal languages (Chinese being one of them) also seem to have a higher chance of being pitch-perfect [2].
[2] Deutsch, D., Henthorn, T., Marvin, E., & Xu H-S (2006). "Absolute pitch among American and Chinese conservatory students: Prevalence differences, and evidence for a speech-related critical period". Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 119 (2): 719–722.
> You lack some perspective and tact, you silly goose. It's not very surprising you and your friends think your native language is easier and that you prefer your own writing system. Way to navel-gaze, hello?
Learn to read first before worrying about tact and perspective. Boyter said, "The Chinese realize their language is a pain in the butt to learn and that the writing system is terrible in comparison to any alphabet system." As a Chinese speaker living among many Chinese speakers and having some proficiency in certain alphabet system, I think I have a say on such thing. Perhaps my sampling size is insignificant, it's still better than a complete baseless lie.
> [Personal anecdotal narrative elided.]
Talking about the lack of perspective, why don't you tell us what is your native language? It won't be news to us if a speaker of a Indo-European language finds another Indo-European language easier to learn than a Sino-Tibetan language.
There has been too much hot air, lets introduce some substance and data: how hard is it to attain literacy in a language?
Take a look at India, a country of similar size, population and economic status to China. According to UN Developement Programme Report 2009(pg. 172-173)[1], India's literacy rate is estimated to be at 66%, while China is at 93.3%.
If GDP percapita is any indication to access to education, Brazil and Mexico have significantly higher GDP/capita than China, but China's literacy is actually slightly better.
You may attribute it to cultural difference or whatever, still, it'd be less of a complete lie to say Chinese is not harder to learn than these other languages than otherwise.
To the rest: sorry for the language and this offtopic debate, but I would not stand by idly seeing people slandering the language I love. I said what I have to say and I will stop now.
> I seem to remember that the common Chinese idiom for a tough to learn language is 跟天书一样. "Hard as the heavenly script". If you really refer to your own language as yardstick for complexity, his post has a point.
What is the point? I use my own language as a reference point because it's the language I know best. And I hope others would do the same: comment on things you know best and stop spreading lies, myths, pointless memes about things you know little.
When we say "天书", we usually refer to "无字天书" (the divine book without letter); i.e., a blank book for those of us without magical power. Again, I don't see relevancy here. We don't need magical power to learn Chinese.
No. The Chinese realize their language is a pain in the butt to learn and that the writing system is terrible in comparison to any alphabet system.
As a native speaker of Mandarin Chinese, I think you are full of shit. No native Chinese speaker I know thinks English is easier to learn than Chinese. And I prefer the Chinese writing system myself if I have a choice.
It's true that many people are learning English, because today Chinese are producing and selling. When the day comes when Chinese become buyers and the rest of the world are trying to get sales from Chinese, they will start learning Chinese.
If you're interested in Lisp, Objective C and Cocoa, you might also be interested in Clozure[1], a Common Lisp implementation which provides complete access to Cocoa through its Objective C bridge[2].
Pardon my cynicism, but, those who haven't learnt Chinese well tend to exaggerate its difficulty as a pretext to their failure, and those who have do the same to accentuate their achievement. If you are weighing whether to learn Chinese and deterred by its supposed difficulty, I hope you'd take that into account.
I don't remember seeing any "dynamic typing extremists" who would argue that static typing is totally worthless, just that it has cost (e.g., it's an additional concern for the programmers) too in addition to the benefits it provides, and there are often times and cases where the cost dwarves the benefits. I do see static typing advocates who would argue that static typing should be everywhere, at all time, and non-optional.
To the extent that a single case can prove anything, what is being done here in fact strengthens the case for dynamic typing, for it shows that a dynamic language can reap the benefits of static analysis too, WHEN it is beneficial.