How does Złoto Renu sound to you? You can almost feel interferences from złoty, the lawful currency of the Republic of Poland...

Speaking of Wagner, I was actually thinking of going back to http://www.osterfestspiele-salzburg.at/en/programm/2010/ where Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic will complete the realisation of Richard Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen in 2010. I don't think I will ever make it to Bayreuth... 

I see no reason why any of this should be mutually exclusive. The fact that languages are raw material or utilities doesn’t prevent them from having differing aesthetic value.

Similarly, I would most certainly consider programming languages like COBOL and Ada (side note: ADA = Apple Design Awards; the language is called Ada and its name is not an acronym but named after a person called Ada) the same way, as having aesthetic values as well as being merely tools. Ada, for example, is a language I would consider extremely ugly, COBOL is sort of neutral aesthetic-wise, and a language like PHP is very beautiful in my eyes.

I would carry this on to any other utility or utensil: I like my kitchen knives to be sharp and cut well, but I’d also like for them to have a beautiful, sleek design. Apart from purely utilitarian and practical reasons, there are several and important aesthetic reasons that I prefer to work on a Mac, in OS X, to working in Windows or Linux on a PC. Similarly, while any language will, generally speaking, enable the speaker to get the message through more or less equally well, there’s a reason I prefer to use Icelandic or Irish Gaelic to using Arabic or Greenlandic: the latter have significantly lower aesthetic value to my ears than the former.

Overheard this morning a rant on the radio about the omnipresence in Polish of the word "project" adopted from English. Just as is the case with "looking to" in English which gradually eliminates other verbs (Post #185551), "project" is now used for just about any initiative which formerly would be called exhibition, show, performance, screening, publication of a volume of poems. In this particular broadcast, they were happy to announce a series of conversations with authors rather than a new "project."

It is a beauty compared to meila i skena.  

Curious... or perhaps not... but this precisely is what`s happening in Lithuania, too.

You are right, it doesn't prevent them from having differing aesthetic values. It is just that in my opinion their aesthetic value is totally irrelevant to their raison d'être.

Thank you. I hadn't forgotten that. It was just that, judging by past record, I feared that nobody here would be old enough to remember the Lady Ada Lovelace, whose pretty picture appeared all over the green box in which the compiler was delivered so I decided to sacrifice accuracy for recognizability and typed it as ADA which, to my mind, stood a chance of being seen as a programming language.

I once worked with a programmer who looked like her. The whole get-up was notably unsuited to crawling about behind the patch panel to see what had broken off this time but I must say that she smelt very nice.

I could have written PASCAL instead and I would still not have made it into Pascal after old Blaise, mainly because his image is far less attractive. Maybe I should have written COBOL as Cobol after Dr. Grace Cobol of Remington-Rand, the inventor, who was also something of a good-looker. 

Well, there you see the problem - the language might be ugly but the shrink-wrapped box was not. What was a poor red-blooded man to do? Sacrifice aesthetic value for carnal lust?

I tend to run for cover when women and sharp kitchen knives enter the conversation. It is a primitive reaction, I know, but then I have had my unfortunate experiences ...

Derek

This is evidence, though, that our languages are very much alive and adapting... See Post #185567...

Rather than beauty, it seems to be dictated by the master of the universe in the form of fast-changing industrial needs, unless of course you have the luxury of buying art pieces for arts sake. Even Microsoft seems to say monthly updates are the norm, and to hell with perfection..

I was taught FORTRAN in university and did projects using Z80 assembly language and Pascal, but right out of university, it was C language and Intel assembly language.