"Updating" in the phrase "Software updating" as a status message isn't a gerund though. It looks a lot like a gerund but it's really a casual form that drops the rest of the verb "[is] updating".
- a gerund form which is always the same as the infinitive,
- a different gerund form (verb-'ung', kind of cognate to verb-'ing', both derived from a Latin construct I believe), and
- a present participle
...in addition to the other declensions. It's fascinating to me how Dutch and English can be seen as two parallel derivatives of the old High German language, where as what we now call German has developed along a largely different path!
I don't know enough German to be sure of a rule about when the -ung form does and doesn't occur, but I can think of verbs that don't have it (confirmed with grep!), so it's not completely productive. (First examples offhand: essen, haben, denken, gehen, although the latter does seem to do -ung with some prefixes.)
It's also interesting to think of how to describe the semantic difference between the -en and -ung nouns when both do exist. I think one case is that the -ung can often describe the result of completing the action of the verb or in some sense refer to a "complete instance" or "complete occasion" of the verb's action, but this is generalizing from just a few examples...
Wiktionary seems to agree with my guess about the meaning of -ung:
> forms nouns from verbs, usually describing either an event in which an action is carried out, or the result of that action.
> Note that the -ung suffixed form is different from the gerund which is formed by simply capitalizing the first letter of the verb. The gerund usually refers to the activity in general rather than a specific instance or result.
The -ung words also feel slightly more technical to me. When you read laws, for instance, there are quite a lot of 'ungs', more so perhaps than in colloquial writing. Maybe that is because, as you put it, "completing the action of the verb" has a more abstract meaning that referring to a specific act. In English, it feels to me like we too would (in laws, for instance) be more wont to use the '-tion' form of a verb rather than the '-ing' gerund. Perhaps also that, the longer the word, the more technical it feels in any language :)
That's interesting. "Completion" vs. "completing".
I tried this to get all of the dictionary pairs for comparison:
import re
german = set(open("/usr/share/dict/ngerman").read().split())
english = set(open("/usr/share/dict/words").read().split())
tech_de = "ung"
gerund_de = "en"
tech_en = "tion"
gerund_en = "ting"
for word in sorted(list(german)):
if word[0].isupper() and word.endswith(tech_de):
gerund = re.sub(tech_de + "$", gerund_de, word)
if gerund in german:
print(word, gerund)
print()
for word in sorted(list(english)):
if word[0].islower() and word.endswith(tech_en):
gerund = re.sub(tech_en + "$", gerund_en, word)
if gerund in english:
print(word, gerund)
Unfortunately the English pairs aren't quite complete because the morphological change isn't always simply a matter of s/tion$/ting/, but we get a large number of pairs in each language to look at!
I put a sample output of this up at https://sethschoen.com/gerund-comparison.txt in case anyone wants to look at it (not promising to keep it there forever!). (Note the default character encoding from the web server is wrong so you may have to change encodings manually, or download the file and reopen it, to see German umlaut characters correctly.)
They don’t have anything like that. Just like flat earth believers don’t have anything like that. They specifically don’t care what is reality. They pretend to care, but even if they themselves prove otherwise, even then they won’t change their mind, because it’s not about truth, or what is dogmatic. We just create these explanations, because we try to make it logical. The answer is probably way closer to “try to belong to a group”, and “being alone”, than anything like thinking about what is dogmatic, or whether the current concept of knowledge is all right or not.
not allow private companies to accumulate so much capital by breaking them up and taxing them fairly. then use the budget for things like single payer healthcare and affordable housing
I don't think its any less convenient for my partner than if I worked in an actual office. Plus, I still have the added benefit of no commute, which means more time with my partner.
oh my god when will js devs learn this cycle has been going on so much longer than 7 years? I mean it's almost funny if it wasn't so depressing that JavaScript is eating up all the web dev jobs.
Js is eating up? Js-uber-alles has largely been the way of things for half a decade! And the pendulum has already headed strong back & is gaining speed! That's what's changing, now: there's finally other options again!
The recent WASI 0.2.0 submission/discussion is about WASI, a chiefly server-side oriented system & so far server-side component model, but this component model is the cross-platform gateway that is opening up the (vastly larger now) webdev world to something that a long time ago the web was incredibly at: being a place for many different languages to come & try stuff out. And this time it'll be in a cross-language form! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39143054
You're right it's been a direction for a long time. I hope some other languages & communities can find & expose worthy incredibly interesting offerings that lure us off the beaten path we are on. It'll be technically/mechanically much easier to do, starting now-ish, but whether there is distinct clear value to writing your core in other languages is so far very unclear. Will it make a difference? Will other ideas arise & prove valuable & steer us onwards? T.B.D.
There is this book "The Fourth Turning" that makes some very outrageous claims about cycles in American History. Perhaps the book is actually correct, just it turns out to be about the Javascript ecosystem
I get a feeling that JS is tainting everything. JSON is used everywhere, JS is used to build desktop apps, new languages are infected with JS-like features.
