Linguistics

When I’m travelling, particularly recently, I start to kind of worry myself. Here in Amsterdam for some reason I keep on wanting to use German. Which doesn’t really help matters, all things considered.

As it is, I’m OK with languages, except that I find I now have problems keeping them straight in my head. It’s not just “normal” languages, either – because of the work I do, there’s about four programming languages floating round at the same time, and I wonder if there’s some finite limit to the scope of the language centres of one’s brain.

My laptop’s no better either – currently it’s got Python, Perl, ASP and PHP on it, as well as all the normal gubbins for HTML, SQL, and the like. In addition, because of the first tutorial tomorrow morning, ( 8.30 – sounds OK ’til you remember that Holland is an hour in front of the UK, so I’ll be sitting in a tutorial at 7.30 in the morning. Gah) I’ve also just installed Ruby on Rails on here too.

I’m not sure which of us is going to break down first…