The greatest language

I believe that the great leveler of the societies of the first and second worlds is not the English language or any of the other 82 languages shown above. I believe the greatest language of all is the language of computer science. The concept of ideas, functions and operations expressed through an intermediate language.

I am poor at languages. My first language is English and I’ve studied French, Japanese and Cantonese. But even after “immersion”, I still suck at all my second languages. At one point in my education, I got very good at learning languages, computer languages. At one point, during graduate school, I learned 17 languages in ten weeks. In those ten weeks, I learned useful languages such as Snoball4, LISP, PL/1 and 14 others. Later at work I learned COBOL, C, SQL, C++, JCL and Assembler. Computer languages all. At first I thought that this would be important for me and my career and then as each of them became obsolete, I began to doubt their importance.

And then I began to travel. During this time I realized that the commonality of all societies is not necessarily the language and culture, but the ideas, functions and operations of daily life. Just like computer science languages. The great leveler.

I’ve visited 37 countries (16%) of the recognized countries on Earth. (You too can determine where you’ve been at the site World66). My conjecture is that the past 20 years have been the only time in the history of mankind that you could take a person with no other language skills and provide them with a lucrative and transferable means of not only communicating, but thriving in a majority of the places on Earth.

Like everything else, you think you’ve done a lot and been a lot of places and then you realize that where you’ve been or what you’ve done is minutia. So how countries should you travel to before you can consider yourself an experienced person or a world traveler?

First off, how many countries and territories are there?

Many sources offer different answers, and depending on the source, there are 189, 191, 192, 193 or 194 independent countries in the world today. The United Nations has 191 members (including East Timor, the newest nation) but that number does not include the Vatican, an independent nation.

How about if you had your own plane…and you were the most traveled president of the US?

• Bill Clinton made 133 visits to foreign nations -- a Presidential record (see Appendix 1 for a year-by-year listing of Clinton's trips).
• These 133 visits break down into an average of 16.6 nations visited per year, another Presidential record.
• In his eight years, Clinton made more foreign visits than Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon combined (over the years 1953 -1974).
• In his eight years, Clinton visited almost as many nations as Presidents Carter, Reagan, and Bush combined (over the years 1977-1993).
• While Clinton was President for one-sixth of the period analyzed (eight of the 48 years between 1953 and 2001), he accounted for almost one-third of all Presidential visits.
• Clinton visited 74 different countries or entities

But even the President of the United States pales in comparison to Charles Veley.

“Charles Veley of San Francisco, California, USA, has, by age 40 years, 7 months, 26 days, traveled to 570 places, and is currently the #1 ranked traveler on earth.” One more point. Charles Veley was made rich by the Internet.

Computer Science; the greatest language on Earth.