The problem with insects is their sheer number. There are millions of species. How many million we can’t say, and our guesses even as to the appropriate order of magnitude are tentative.* Certainly, there are too many for any language to absorb into common parlance. Most pass their lives entirely unnoticed by humans, and any specialists who happen to work on them are content with the scientific names. This is to say, most insects have no common name at all.
*for more on the diversity of life, see Rob Dunn’s book Every Living Thing.
May 6, 2009
No Common Name
December 6, 2008
The Most Memorable Thing a CS Professor Ever Told Me About Software Engineering
The first semester of my sophomore year, I took CS 337: Theory in Programming Practice from Jaydev Misra. On the last day of class, he talked about computer science in general, took questions, and let us out early. And on thing he said really made an impression on me. I’m quoting from what I remember today, I didn’t write the exact quote down, so this could very well be embellished or incorrect in some detail,
Even if we had the fast computers we have today in the 1960’s, and even if we had the internet, we could not have built a modern web-browser, because we did not understand enough about building programs of that complexity.
It’s amazing how young software development is as a discipline.