A friend told me the same thing. He took a job in Russia after high school, speaking only English. He said that often he had to think of the problem at the plant in Russian, because he'd only had the workings of the plant described to him in Russian. He knew that he could switch back to English, but trying to think of "the machine that strips truck tires" (the example he used, I think, because the machine's name in Russian was some compound of those words) lead him in circles.

I never had the luck to learn other languages, because ones with the Roman alphabet feel strange, and ones with other symbols make no sense. But, I don't think about most things in English; I think of them in mathmatical terms and then shift that to letters.

I doubt it. Learning languages requires either immersion at the right ages or study with immersion being very helpful. Both of those also happen to expose a person to multiple perspectives just be their occurrence. If learning a language were just about the ability to shift perspectives, every creative type who look at object A and see use Z for it could pick up a language easily. (see: PIC32 being used as a spectrum analyzer via NTSC, or junk turned into Apollo style Kerbal controllers.)

Besides, most studies like this are maps in just one direction. Take, for instance, that there is an increase in strawberry toaster pastry sales before a big storm (I forget if the study said hurricane or snow or just storms). This does not mean the bijection inverse is true; there is not always a storm happening if there is an increase in sales of said pastry.

You call a person who can speak two languages bilingual.
You call a person who can speak three languages trilingual.
What do you call a person who speaks only one language?

American.

I always found that funny. I learned Apple Basic because it was all that I had access to. I started writing my own functions, a global return array to track back through and some gotos...just like assembly which I hadn't learned then. I also found myself trying to make objects, by camel case iff needed. $ObjectName and ObjectNumber.

Moved to C++ and everything was fine. Functional programming, not so much, but that's from all the professors who drilled "variables are variable" into my head years later.

I've got one with an old DIN type pins, one with what looks like an RJ-11 connector, one with what might be PS compatible . . . they never die, they just retire to the storage bin for springs and key caps for the one that's in use.

I had someone recommend Julia to me over MATLAB and they did it for performance reasons. When I looked about a year ago the stiff ODE solver in Julia gave the wrong answer for the kinds of problems I do. I stopped looking at that point.

Julia will mature in time but right now having something run faster but wrong is not useful.

Octave on the other hand is pretty nice I just like MATLAB more due to the whole IDE that is part of it but I agree with the drolli that in some circumstances octave is a better choice.

I agree that MATLAB can be expensive and that in many ways it would be better if everyone used FOSS. However the reality is that right now my choices are between MATLAB and python and for many tasks MATLAB allows me to get the job done faster and since the job involves human lives it makes the choice fairly simple.

I would like better FOSS tools to replace MATLAB and especially better documentation and defaults and the sad thing is I have the skill to do a lot of that work but not the time. Choosing between making a drug available and making numpy better is a fairly simple choice for me.

This is the kind of reply I like.

There are so many different kinds of tasks in the world that sometimes you find a language or library just seems to fit one of them very well and other times while you could do it the fit is not as good. In the end what matters is getting the job done.

There are just a few things in the MATLAB global optimization toolbox and some of the pde/ode solving built into it that make my life much easier and faster to develop with. However for many other tasks I use python. Right now the toolchain is mixture of python, c++, matlab and excel and strangely enough it works very well and it allows scientists to setup simulations that can then run on clusters and bring data back in a way that they can analyze it and massively speed up development.

How is R a comparison to MATLAB for engineering work? From what I have looked at it does not have a development environment to compare to MATLAB, it also lacks all the solving and non-linear optimization methods that MATLAB has built in. R may be very nice but solving systems of hundreds to hundreds of thousands of coupled ODEs, PDEs and doing non-linear optimization just does not look like something it is very good at.

I am doing very little statistics and mostly writing simulations.

I don't do much in the way of statistics and R just does not seem like a good fit for what I do at all. MATLAB has better PDE solvers, better non-linear optimization and stiff ODE solvers.

Most scientists I have seen publish their MATLAB code however I am more concerned about industry than open research.

How much slower do you think it is okay to get work done in order to put it in a completely free software framework? How many people is it okay to have die from the additional time?

Some things are free and done very well like OpenMP and MPI however for many other tools the free version is just not as good.

I have been a professional python developer for about 10 years now but when writing matrix based simulations and doing data visualization numpy, scipy and matplotlib are not viable competition to MATLAB.

Most free software projects have HORRIBLE documentation and epicly horribly defaults. The problem is that the people that know how to change these things are also too busy doing other work. Yes I do have the skills to fix many parts of matplotlib and numpy but I can also just use MATLAB and get my work done.

Since the work I do is on writing computing simulations for drug manufacturing the more time it takes me to solve a problem the more people DIE. I like free software a lot and have used it for a very long time but I am passed the point of caring much about the license or the cost of the software.

Of the gross, not even on the profit of the game. If the big guys wanted, they'd make sure they got paid before your employees even see a pay check. Sure, company gross probably doesn't count the distributor's share, but it does count pre-tax revenue, and pre-debt revenue, and . . . yeah, it's rather pricey and dangerous to small developers who don't do accounting.

$100 is about what is costs yearly just to keep an LLC registered. Or a day's pay for one programmer or artist if you are really cheap. A one time fee of $100 to distribute on Steam? That should amortize out of any real budget.

The problem is secret courts and that they have been caught spying on everyone multiple times already.

If he was arguing that they should be able to get a court order at a NORMAL court not the FISA one and with probably cause have the right to decrypt the data and only the data covered by the search warrant then I would support him.

I can definitely agree with this.

I know many people, including myself, that don't drink alcohol because it tastes bad. I have tried various kinds of alcohol and in all cases it has tasted worse than other drinks I could get.

There is supposed to be a mutation in a very small percentage of people and it gives alcohol a pretty nasty taste.

I have NO ethical problems with alcohol, I don't mind being around others that are drinking it I just don't like it myself.