I think the whole teaching the history of computers is a big failure at an attempt to Segway into computer organization and architecture.
Nonetheless, I get what is happening. If it’s a pure Computer programming class then the goal maybe to have them understand the “basics”…like what is the hard drive vs RAM (memory allocation) or what is a transistor (Boolean logic) and what is a punch card (mnemonics and abstractions of those mnemonics to what is now just a computer programming language).
This is very much a tangent, but I think it's nearly certain that "segway" will end up overtaking "segue" as the predominant spelling for the word that is defined as: "to make a transition without interruption from one activity, topic, scene, or part to another"
The "mistake" happens so often, partially because "segway" is a much more straightforward spelling if one has only heard the word said aloud, that I think it will eventually become the actual way it is spelled!
FWIW, I did a quick search of our local slack and found 2x the the number of instances of "segue" compared to "segway". And most of the instances of "segway" (around 60%) refer to the actual device, with only a handful of mistakes (around 4). So I'm not sure that this spelling is more common in a corporate environment—maybe do a search for yourself and see!
English is spelled phonetically. Just not Modern English phonetically but Middle English phonetically. And then it froze into ideography because of printing press.
Actually it's not an absurd take at all. The absurd take is that we "should not bend language around ignorance."
That's precisely how language changes over time. Language is not a strict set of rules. It's based on understanding and consensus, so sometimes things that are "wrong" do end up being accepted.
I am not a native speaker, but the two words do not sound even remotely the same.
How does this mistake happen so often? Can you explain people's thought process a bit? Is it just: "Something something 'seg...' ... ah I know, I will simply use another random word that starts with the same 3 letters and doesn't make sense in this phrase!"?
Most mistakes remain mistakes, and do not become part of the language. The idea that mistakes generally get accepted as correct is simply untrue, which is what you are implying.
I am sure people will make the mistake, as they sometimes do today. But it is a mistake, and will likely be recognised as one.
It is likely that the language gets more cemented by automatic spelling and grammatical correction, including using AI. For example, there are a number of grammatical and spelling changes that have been cemented by American spelling/grammar checking programmes ie. by MS Word.
> The idea that mistakes generally get accepted as correct is simply untrue, which is what you are implying.
I did not imply that at all. I said sometimes, so it's not that absurd that it could happen. It does happen though, and a quick google search will give you pages of examples.
Precisely. In English, while mistakes usually get corrected back to common or traditional usage, they are also the fuel for almost every change to English that becomes common usage (and I only add the almost qualifier because I can't decide if categorizing things like "cromulent" as a mistake should count; it was an intentionally made up word in a context where the joke was made up words but may have fallen into common usage because people using it because they were in on the joke were dwarfed by people who didn't know it was a joke and absorbed it as a real word).
With machines looking over our shoulders now and so much of language being typed instead of handwritten, odds are such drift might actually decrease in English... On the other hand, the introduction of AI leaves an interesting avenue for people to begin acting as if something is common usage and have the AI begin confirming that as common if it consumes that action. And then, of course, there's the effect of the machine itself... Most of us have a way to type "résumé", but we don't bother because the machine makes it too much work to do so, So the alternate spelling without accent, which was called out in my high school days as wrong, has fallen into common usage in a generation of people having to submit their resumes online (example: https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a510363).
Was that the point? Don't forget that you're on hackernews, not reddit. Strawmans are less accepted in this community. Individually, you are neither a consensus that was described nor did anybody in this thread implied that "all errors of usage are correct" and accepted. Your sarcasm is unwarranted and provides little value to this conversation.
Personally, I struggled a lot in my earlier CS/Informatics education, partly because I never felt like I understood what was actually happening/how we got here, everything was just factoids in a void. When I took a gap semester between my A.S. and B.S., I finally studied/explored a bit of the history and it put a lot finally in perspective.
Well, you need to come up to something like analysis to appreciate something that's seemingly simple like the number line and that's a loot of math if done only in spare time.
> have them understand the “basics”…like what is the hard drive vs RAM (memory allocation) or what is a transistor (Boolean logic)
You must understand these things at least conceptually if you want to really understand how to write efficient programs. Maybe not at the level of how memory can electronically "remember" a 1 or a zero, or how a hard drive can magnetically do it, but at least the relative speeds e.g. register vs. cache vs. RAM vs. disk.
