Re: Why Python When There Is Perl?

On 3/25/2024 6:41 PM, Physfitfreak wrote:

On 3/24/2024 10:59 PM, rbowman wrote:

On Sun, 24 Mar 2024 17:41:23 -0500, Physfitfreak wrote:
>

Huh... This is a good point. I had never thought of that... Alexander
did get pretty close to India! In fact he occupied the northern part of
India which has recently become Pakestan.

>
Don't forget that Alexander was a late comer. Persia owned Afghanistan,
Pakistan. and a chunk of India when it invade Greece in 492 BCE. Cyrus had
already eaten Ionia and the rest of the Greek settlements on that side of
the pond.
>
Was there an exchange of ideas and which way did it flow? Who knows.
People get around. There's a lot of legend involved but Bodhidharma is
supposed to have started Chan Buddhism in China. In the art work he isn't
depicted as Chinese and in the legends he is either from Persia, India, or
some other vague place far away to the west. Wherever, he had a lot of
miles on his sandals.

  Yes it may have well been 300 years before Alexander. The present West Turkey was historically part of Greece, and the entire Asia Minor was under the control of Cyrus on the west side, and his empire had a very long border with India. So it is possible that the source was only Greece, and it was from there that it travelled east all the way to India.
 Still, I have doubts. The oldest Indian books have plenty of math in them. Somebody with math background and excellent knowledge of old Indian languages, and several other ones, including middle and old Persian (Pahlavi and Avestan) and Arabic, should take a very close look at it to see if this math prowess in there dates from anywhere before the time of Cyrus or came later. I'm not sure how authentic Indian sources are also, as far as the date of their appearance is concerned.
 Also, when we say "Greece", should the mind go there, where Greece now is?  Many of the math and science developers were living in Egypt and may have been ethnic Egyptians who spoke and wrote in Greek, and who had a civilization of their own which dealt much with Math (Pyramids, and a vast number of other needed calculations pertaining management of huge amounts of agricultural products). Nile was there in Egypt, creating all such products and the need to deal with.
 And soon after Cyrus, Darius ruled over Egypt as well and even occupied part of today's Greece also. So I still have doubts about Greece.
 A physicist, when several factors like that pop up in front of him, takes a step back and looks at the whole picture.
 The whole picture is, math was developed where it was _badly_needed_. The intense need was the result of agricultural products attaining vast quantities. Vast quantities, required agriculturally rich lands, which are always around large rivers for reasons of water and the quality of soil.
 Now, India had its mighty Ganges. Iran on northeast had her Amu Darya and Syr Darya, and on her southwest had the Tigris and Euphrates. And Egypt had her mighty Nile, the longest river in the world.
 What did Greece have?... Did they sit and play with their balls and this led them to take the next step and devise Euclidean Geometry? Do you see the picture? Written history aside (which is always full of partiality and bullshit), the need for math must've arisen elsewhere, either in Egypt, or in Iran, or in India.
 That's my best guess.
       

Prediction and knowing of the time of the year also played a role in developing math, and was the result of agricultural needs. Plus, managing anything that had to do with multitude of men required math. Men began to be around themselves in great numbers when cities were first created, again as a result of development of agriculture.
And as soon as some useful method would be developed, it would travel fast to wherever else it was badly needed. The source could be the Greeks, but the ones who were in Egypt as ethnic Greeks.
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