Last week I discussed my great teacher Joachim, the greatest linguist and semiotician I have ever met. While I turned down Joachim’s offer to work for him and “join the family,” it was his teachings that inspired me to finally accept Columbia University’s offer to pursue my doctorate there (I had turned it down three times in favor of the green hills of North Carolina–the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill specifically).
The reason that I finally accepted Columbia’s offer was not that I suddenly developed a yearning for overcrowded cities, but it was instead that I was offered a chance to study with Umberto Eco and finish my training that Joachim had started. With this in mind, I accepted Columbia’s offer and began work that Summer on a large programming project. It was to my horror that at the end of that Summer, Umberto Eco canceled his year at Columbia University as a scholar in residence at the Italian House. Abandoned, I was left on my own to finish the training Joachim had started and I did it by studying the modern languages that Joachim had discussed with me. It was really from studying these modern languages that I came to better understand the concept that Joachim had taught me about languages. Let me explain.
Modern Languages as Specific Tools
Joachim taught me that there was a tradition in the “modern Latin” languages of attempting to capture the creativity of ancient Greek. He told me that this all started with Provencal and the troubadours and continued with Italian and French and the Sicilian School and the Pleiade respectively. While he respected these languages and their great practitioners, Joachim believed that Spanish had largely achieved the goal set out by the other languages. He told me that magical realism, which can be traced back to Cervantes, demonstrates this fact. One only needs to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, or Isabel Allende to see this in action in a more contemporary sense.
As far as structure and control, Joachim believed that no modern language embodied the heritage of ancient Latin as well as modern German. He stated this was clearly demonstrated by the German philosophers and the Vienna Circle of Logicians. Indeed, Joachim believed that it was not random that the modern computer architecture and game theory was articulated by a German speaker, John von Neumann. This last concept was a topic of endless discussion in as much as Joachim, as all great teachers, sought to make his teachings more real to me by allowing me to make the concept my own. In this sense, I taught him about computer languages or at least taught what little I knew then.
This leaves us with a language of morality. Without going into too much detail, Joachim said that nothing does this quite the same as Semitic languages, thus he related all this back to Hebrew, and yes, Arabic. That is a deep topic that I will not even begin to address it here, but as strange as it may seem to some, I had my first lectures on Arabic from a former rabbi and he was quite positive on the impact that the languages had on both peoples (the Hebrews and the Arabs). His views were different but similar in method to those espoused by Raphael Patai, author of not only the Jewish Mind and the Arab Mind but also the author of numerous books of Jewish Alchemy, a subject that Joachim was more than a little familiar with.
Is There A Perfect Language?
As much as speakers of Spanish, German or Arabic may think of their languages as “perfect,” or at least “perfectible,” Joachim viewed them as tools to aid us in the development of our own cognitive processes. To be clear, he did not think that Spanish, German, or Arabic could substitute for studying Greek, Latin, and Hebrew (as I did) but he respected these languages nonetheless. So, this begs the question, what did he think of English?
This is a vast topic, but in short, he respected English, but he thought that it attempted to do too much. He explained to me that modern English came about right at the same time as modern Spanish, and in place of the creative genius of Cervantes, English had Shakespeare. In this sense, he said that English became a creative language. Harold Bloom would no doubt agree with Joachim because he defined Shakespeare as defining the modern human personality and indeed the modern world. Joachim also explained that it was at this same time, that of Shakespeare, that English took upon itself the great task of translating the Torah and the ancient scriptures of the Jews in addition to the early writings of the Christians. Joachim explained that this work, collectively known as the King James Bible, helped transform English into a language capable of conveying subtle and implicit morality. Finally, Joachim then explained that English took its turn to structure with the foundational work of Francis Bacon and the later works of the Royal Academy. Of course, Joachim pointed out that Francis Bacon did his work at precisely the same time as Shakespearean’s work and the King James Bible. He said, these three efforts were then fittingly “crowned” with Bacon’s final work, The New Atlantis, that described a new land that had scientist priests, not too dissimilar to how he thought the United States perceives itself.
As much as Joachim admired the effort of English, he believed that its attempt to create a universal language was simply not possible for human beings since “being banished from the Garden.” So how does this relate to the ULISSES Project?
Languages of Structure: Ada, Eiffel, and C++
When I was younger, I foolishly looked for a universal computer language. At first, I thought it was Philippe Kahn’s Turbo Pascal and then Turbo C. Then I went to Italy and studied with Joachim and I realized that languages were tools and I needed to think about having the right tool for the job. At the beginning, I had to deal with a true complex structure when I was working on my dissertation at Columbia. I simply could not find a single language that could accommodate my structure so I used a mix of numerous languages for different tasks, but I never stopped looking for a single language that I could use to unify the complex structure I worked with.
Instead of becoming a professor, I left for the industry to begin an ascent of what Von Neuman called the “Hierarchy of Models” in pursuit of the elusive “Infinite Forecast.” In my first job at the world’s largest investment manager, I saw what devastation had occurred when they had tried to unify everything in an inadequate language, in this case, Ada. For those of you that don’t know, Ada was developed for heavy structures as employed in the defense industry. In short, the attempt to unify everything in Ada was a $200 million mistake. Seeing this, I rebuilt a structure cobbling things together just as I did in grad school, using disparate languages including statistical and mathematical languages (SAS, Matlab, and R) and other utility languages such as SQL, Perl, and Java. This is what I did until about 2014. It was at this time that the models became so complex that they couldn’t simply be pulled together with coding’s versions of duct tape and baling wire.
It was at that point that I started to experiment with languages such as Eiffel, a teaching language developed at ETH Zurich by Bertrand Meyer. I even talked to Bertrand after I read pretty much everything I could get my hands on about his language. That said, I soon grew to understand that even this visionary language could not accommodate the complexity of the intricate models I was dealing with. This is not to say that there was not much to learn from the language. Eiffel taught me incredible concepts such as Design by Contract, but I soon learned that it simply did not have a large enough community supporting it and that if I used it, I would find myself constantly playing catchup with a language that had a broader open source community behind it. Eventually, we settled on a variant of C++ but I have to say that I learned my structure from the guys at Zurich.
So, after all these years, I find myself looking back to my teacher, the former rabbi and businessman, Joachim and thinking how right he was that English is not the answer to everything, but instead German (or at least a German-speaking place, Zurich) was needed to teach me structure in a modern sense.
With this in mind, I’m thankful to Bertrand Meyer and all his colleagues that spent so much time teaching that structure. In this sense, I look at Eiffel not unlike Pascal, in that it is truly amazing for teaching certain concepts.
Now that we’ve covered structure, let’s talk about creativity next week.