I am happy for one reason only:

I called it. Two months ago:

Nick Nicholas’ answer to What’s the next useful and perfectly good feature that Quora is going to do away with?

Wild speculation:

*touch wood* Blogs.

[…]

The current trend though, is away from social media functionality, and has been deemphasising your followers. So:

Less Wild speculation:

In the display of your followers, or the mouseover display of a user: the followers you have in common.

It’s the last piece of the puzzle: MVW badges and TW quills have already been taken away from the former.

EDIT: Yes, Quora has put the mutual followers field back.

For now.

See links in Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why does Quora permit foul language?

It used to, five years ago: What is the guideline on the use of profanity on Quora?

See Marc Bodnick’s answer to What is the guideline on the use of profanity on Quora? [Originally Answered: Is profanity a violation of the Be Nice rule?] (2011, incorporated into Answer Wiki)

Users should avoid unnecessary profanity.

Tracey Bryan’s answer to Why aren’t rules guiding the use of profanity enforced more on Quora? (2012)

Quora has a policy against profanity: What is the guideline on the use of profanity on Quora?

The reviewers and admins will thus edit questions, or collapse answers, which are in contravention to this policy, but they can’t be everywhere.

Quora appears not to any more. As witnessed by all the Top Writers since 2013 answering questions like this with variations of “FUCK no, ahahahahahaha!!!!11!!!11”. Starting with:

Dan Holliday’s answer to What is the guideline on the use of profanity on Quora? [Originally Answered: Is it appropriate to use curse words in your answers in Quora?] (2013)

If not, then I’m in big fucking trouble.

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Here’s an answer from seven years ago, on why using the Q&A format to publish Quora policy guarantees this kind of confusion when policy changes—or indeed policy at all:

Xianhang Zhang’s answer to What are some of the basic “Community Management 101” mistakes that Quora has made? (2010)

Dogfooding is all well and good but Quora deciding to put its charter documents in the same Q&A system as everything else means that they’re fragmented and may as well not exist for new users.

Do read the rest of that answer and weep, btw.

So you seek to translate:

Ich möchte aus meinem Herzen hinaus
Unter den großen Himmel treten.

“I would like to step out of my heart,
And go walking beneath the enormous sky.”

I’ll start by putting in the missing accent marks 🙂

ἐκ τῆς καρδίας βούλομαι ἐκβαίνειν
ὑπὸ τῷ μεγάλῳ οὐρανῷ βαδίζειν

I am so, so not going to have anything to say about metre: never got the hang of it.

The Greek matches the English, but not the German. Notice that the Greek repeats ek– : “step out, out of my heart”; the German repeats the aus: “out of my heart, away”, but the verb isn’t there at all: it’s literally “I would out of my heart, away, beneath the great heaven to tread”. So I’d get rid of ἐκβαίνειν: the Greek should be as taut as the German.

The other problem is that ἐκ τῆς καρδίας sounds like “from my heart” (which in German would be von Herzen); in fact Aristophanes uses it in that meaning in Clouds 86 ἀλλ’ εἴπερ ἐκ τῆς καρδίας μ’ ὄντως φιλεῖς “but if you truly love me from your heart”.

Homeric/Poetic Greek is not something I’m in any way comfortable, but maybe ἑκάς ‘far away from’?

And for the ‘great heaven’, I’m thinking ‘broad’—cf. the Orthodox icon caption of the Virgin Mary as πλατυτέρα τῶν οὐρανῶν.

τῆς καρδίας ἑκάς βούλομαι
ὑπὸ τῷ πλατεῖ οὐρανῷ ἐκβαδίζειν

“away from the heart I wish
under the broad heaven to step out”

Someone else do the metre.

Ptolemy, at least, expressed them somewhat clumsily, by adding reciprocals. There were dedicated symbols for half: [math]unicode{x10175}, unicode{x10176}[/math], two thirds: [math]unicode{x10177}[/math], and three quarters: [math]unicode{x10178}.[/math] Outside of those, fractions were expressed by using double prime for reciprocals, ″.

So Ptolemy used ιβ″ = 1/12 a lot for geographical coordinates; and he would also use expressions like γ″ιβ″ = 1/3 + 1/12 = 5/12 or [math]unicode{x10175}[/math]ιβ″ = 1/2+1/12 = 7/12.

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EDIT: For those without font support for Ancient Greek Numerals:

A Q&A site like Quora, with more “facts”, and even fewer “non-facts” (e.g. less sociability)?

Stack Exchange. Quite Savage in its culture of Just The Facts, but overall very reputable, aggressively moderated by its users, and its programming forum Stack Overflow is the canonical place for programmers to go for advice.

“So if you hate Quora so much, why don’t you go there?”

Because it’s Quite Savage in its culture of Just The Facts. I stay here because, the best efforts of Quora’s UX team notwithstanding, it is still possible to socialise here.

Anvil Chorus (Verdi: Il Trovatore, chorus from act 2, scene 1). 1:02 in the attached video.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=WEMMVHAINFM

May John Clarke (satirist) rest in peace.

Complimentary, but not deep.

The interwebs widely quote Chomsky saying in Kolkata, in a 10-minute speech in 2001, “The first generative grammar in the modern sense was Panini’s grammar”: An event in Kolkata. Chomsky in fact already said that in the preface of Aspects in 1965: “a generative grammar, in essentially the contemporary sense of this term” . And the final line of The Sound Pattern of English is an allusion to the final sutra of Panini, “ā → ā”.

But as Kiparsky and Staal noted in 1969, Panini’s model of generativity has very different constructs between the two levels: they are derivations, not rewritings. An anecdote on Chomsky’s linguistic theory suggests that Chomsky ended up going back to an approach more like Panini’s with Minimalism in 1991—and might have saved himself 26 years if he’d read Panini more closely when he was citing him in Aspects.

But of course, Chomsky wasn’t learning from Panini, or honing his craft against the Indian master. Chomsky came up with transformations on his own, and merely found it convenient occasionally to allude to Panini as an antecedent. Panini and Chomsky were not undertaking the same research programme, after all.

Well, let’s think this through.

I count three programming paradigms from when I was studying computer science 25 years ago: functional, logical, and procedural. They correspond to three types of semantics: denotational, axiomatic, and operational. The first two are pristine and beautiful articulations of mathematics and logic, respectively. The last involves modelling the internal state of a von Neumann machine, and is so ugly, it’s embarrassing to express it in mathematical notation at all.

By default, I would say denotational semantics comes closest to how formal linguists think of linguistic semantics. It uses statements about the world to formulate a model of the world. And that’s what humans do, in making assertive speech acts.

The catch is, the reason we interact with computers through programming languages is not assertive: we are not (yet) having a debate with the computer about moral philosophy or fiscal policy, for example. It is directive: we are trying to get the computer to do things for us.

The most straightforward way of directing an action is by issuing directive speech acts. We couch our commands to other people as questions and statements out of politeness, but we don’t really do that with a computer. And even when we are doing functional or logical programming, we are not truly authoring mathematical or logical proofs. We are using the mechanisms of those proofs, to get the computer to do something. What we choose to express in those paradigms is still driven by that goal.

(I did a semester project writing a parser in Prolog. My most important learning? Logic programming is still programming.)

So while functional programming is probably closest to how we think of natural language in general, procedural programming is closest to how we think of language in the context of human-computer interaction.

Originally Answered:

Quora now removes the number of upvotes before one clicks it. Why don’t they also remove the number of views and who upvoted it?

Seeing many Quorans that I am following, it’s not hard to see the upvotes must be over 1000, which I believe contradicts to the original intent of not letting users see the number of upvotes before you click it. Also, I can see the numbers of views and comments; it’s not hard to guess a viral answer.

Well then, I guess they will get rid of those now too. Thanks a bunch, OP.

The removal of social media functionality over the last couple of months has been incremental. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Views preview went away before you expand out an answer—in fact, the whole line would need to go in the preview mode. Hiding it in all circumstances, OTOH, would be… counterproductive: if you do want to find out how many people viewed the answer or upvoted it, do you really want to do three clicks, or view it only if you’ve upvoted the answer yourself?

Killing the comments count, I would *hope*, they would be more reluctant to do: that goes to usability.

Stop laughing.

Khateeb, I have no idea, but I can surmise based on:

• The Death of the Urdu Script – ali eteraz – Medium
• Nastaʿlīq script – Wikipedia

If your technology is handwriting, it doesn’t particularly matter whether your writing is vertical or horizontal, or a mix of both.

If you’re writing online in 2017, and you want to use a vertical script like Mongolian… well, read Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why doesn’t Mongolia use the Uighur script again and leave out Cyrillic?

And Nastaliq goes both vertical and horizontal. If you read the Wikipedia page, metallic, traditional typesetting of Nastaliq has been a non-starter for that reason. Digital typesetting in theory should be easier, but of course in practice it is a hassle, especially if you can just use Naskh as an alternative.

Wikipedia says that the InPage custom Desktop Publishing software, which exists to do Nastaliq, is extensively used now for Urdu. For publishing, maybe; the Medium blog above shows how little penetration Nastaliq has had among laypeople online, and how grateful they were that Microsoft started supporting Nastaliq at all in 2011.

Khateeb, you’ll have to tell me how widely Nastaliq is seen in Urdu. You asked though about Persian. If I interpret Wikipedia correctly, while Nastaliq originated in Persia, its use in Persian is limited to poetry; Pashto uses both Naskh and Nastaliq, and Kashmiri, Punjabi and Urdu—and Ottoman Turkish—used Nastaliq. For whatever reason, it seems that Nastaliq flourished as an everyday script, rather than a calligraphy-only script, only east of Persia. Possibly because Persia neighbours Naskh territory (Arabic), and Urdu neighbours Persian, not Arabic.

So, if I had to guess why Persian sticks with Naskh: combination of technical difficulties, and not a strong enough identification with Nastaliq to bother surmounting the technical difficulties (unlike Urdu).