it's less about thought jumping than i thought in the end. thanks for the pointer! co-evolution of neocortex size, group size and language in humans

group size plus brain size equals predicted group size for humans of 147.8. i always enjoy the comma here.

modern humans "A group of 200, for instance, would have to devote 56.6% of its day to social grooming. For any organism that also has to earn a living in the real world, this would place a significant strain on its ability to balance its time budget.

but than modern humans have languages, a time saving tool for social grooming, dunbar goes on.

Thus, language introduces major savings by allowing an individual to do two different things at once. My suggestion, then, is that language evolved as a "cheap" form of social grooming, so enabling the ancestral humans to maintain the cohesion of the unusually large groups demanded by the particular conditions they faced at the time.

but maybe that's too optimistic and if you wanna be a recognized part of family, you maybe still need to invest that time for "grooming" ... wondering when this word will make it into manag*tabletalk.

back again at networking theories tipping point, linked, the wisdom of crowds, nexus, ...

hackers and painters, paul graham "The more you have to say to get something done, the harder it is to see bugs"

To become popular, a programming language has to be the scripting language of a popular system. Fortran and Cobol were the scripting languages of early IBM mainframes. C was the scripting language of Unix ... So if you want to design a popular language, you either have to supply more than a language, or you have to design your language to replace the scripting language of some existing system.

"Bookstores are one of the most important places for learning about new languages."

"three things any language needs—a free implementation, a book, and something to hack."

for the typoists and universal language nihilists: "The most important kind of succinctness comes from making the language more abstract."

language designers would do better to consider their target user to be a genius who will need to do things they never anticipated, rather than a bumbler who needs to be protected from himself. The bumbler will shoot himself in the foot anyway.

if you want to make a language that is used for big systems, you have to make it good for writing throwaway programs, because that's where big systems come from.

history of perl: didn't know, that it was thrown away itself and originally a tool for system administrators.

actually not so hard to guess, if you take it from a living creature perspective: libraries, the future programming language needs great designed libraries, graham says - ok, true, different world, different meaning, having fun here ...

tenet 1 ... Volkswagen ran an ad campaign with the phrase "small is beautiful" in the US to promote the VW bug, but the idea was generally ignored in the US until the price of oil went up and Americans learned the advantages of small cars.

from small-car-appreciators to programmers at at&t bell labs: "the unix philosophy, mike gancarz

everytime military is just too close ... maybe later.