this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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Programmer Humor
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I feel like the joke would've landed better if it said "first". I know it's pronounced the same way, but I'm gonna argue anyway that there's a subtle difference. I've heard 0th used in cs to describe what was at the 0-index, so in that context 1st would be"second", but "first" generally means "nothing before it". English is weird. I wonder if anyone knows whether the word "first" or "1st" came 1st (lol)?
Ordinal vs. cardinal. It's "first" not "onest", right? Even the ancient proto-Germanic speakers could tell there's a difference. (In fact, it's basically a contraction of "foremost", and has nothing to do with numbers; their weak numeracy was an advantage on this topic)
If we weren't implicitly choosing 1-indexing it would be 1nd for "second" (and still not "onend" or something). That breaks down once you get to third and fourth, though.
programmer linguistigs is certainly something to behold.
Fun fact, Noam Chomsky's linguistic theories were and are the foundation of parsing.