Title
Japanese - a programmer's language
Video
Slide
Abstract
At first glance, Japanese looks to westerners like a very strange and difficult language. However, in many ways it is more similar to English than other European languages are, and an increasing amount of its vocabulary comes from English. In addition, so far I have found Japanese to be a very logical language.
While half an hour is not sufficient to teach the entirety of the Japanese language, I intend to show a glimpse of what Japanese is like, and some of its interesting idiosyncrasies. This will include "English made in Japan" (wasei-eigo), honorifics such as the "san" in "Daniel-san", and why both toilets and temples get the same "o" prefix (bikago).
Speaker
Andrew Grimm
Affiliation
University of New South Wales.
Bio
Andrew Grimm is a bioinformatician at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He came across Ruby while using Rails at his previous job associated with the Encyclopedia of Life, but now specialises in Plain Old Ruby Objects.
He has worked on various projects outside of work. One analyzed why you always end up at "Philosophy" in Wikipedia. Another was a fork of Heckle in which zombies eat your brains unless your unit tests can kill them all. At RubyKaigi 2011 he demonstrated the Small Eigen Collider, which generates random Ruby code that can be run under different implementations of Ruby to check for inconsistencies or bugs.
He started learning Japanese in order to cope with Tokyo for RubyKaigi 2011, expecting to quit a few weeks after starting the course. He forgot to give up.
GitHub
Language
English (slides will be in both English and Japanese)