/nuz baɪts/
Not a wire news service but still more reliable than most newspapers.
Language Evolution Actually Just Buggy Python Script. Original Coder Is Sorry. Blames Mushroom Pizza.
Appearing bleary-eyed in front of the press at 4pm today, amateur coder and fan of 90s rock, Ivor Punne, apologised for his unFORTRANate contribution to linguistics: accidentally triggering all language evolution with a buggy Python script.
He said this afternoon:
- I was just heading out for some Raspberry PIE to soothe a bad case of back vowels. Although I PASCALled the medical tests, I was worried I’d have to have COBOL surgery and end up with a semi-colon at the end of the line. I headed out feeling a bit Grimm but decided not to get a vocal fry up after what happened last time. That stuff is Poison, I tell you.
- I had been tinkering with genetic algorithms and playing about with random data I scraped from the internet. How was I to know it was live stuff? I mean the LLMs get away with just scooping whatever they feel like with no ill effects, why shouldn’t I?
- Once I had done a depth-first search for something BASIC to eat, I started taking a random walk back to my root. I wasn’t trilled to see some folks ahead whose place of articulation was right in the middle of Linkin Park. I got so nervous, I developed a LISP and stood on some ice, leading to some offglide hardening in The Shins.
- By the time I got home, the code had gone nuts. I couldn’t C where the problem was. Look, I’m a coder, not a language assembler or interpreter. About 20 minutes later, it was producing a whole bunch of case endings and wasn’t even Finnished. I went to grab some Milk to give me the fortition of thought to figure out what to do. Of course, I couldn’t just pull the plug as I thought Interpol would pull up and ask if it was a Sweet Child of Mine and I’d have to voice the truth. I’ve felt much velar before, let me tell you.
- After a couple of hours, there were tones all over the place, rising and falling; German was developing and you don’t want to know the saga behind Icelandic. You’d need a whole viking backpack for the book I could write about that.
- And that’s about it, really. Look, I’m sorry and I’ll find a way to clean up. I don’t think I can do much about English though. That’s just a whole bunch of lost cases.
Mr Punne accepted no further questions but is to be extradited to Java until he has paid his syntax.
