John McWhorter, in World Affairs Journal: Linguistic death is proceeding more rapidly even than species attrition. According to one estimate, a hundred years from now the 6,000 languages in use today will likely dwindle to 600. The question, though, is whether this is a problem. Who argues that we must preserve each pod of whales because of the particular songs they happen to have developed? The main loss when a language dies is not cultural but aesthetic. In many Amazonian languages, when you say something you have to specify, with a suffix, where you got the information.
O'Reilly: Now there are more than 2,500 documented programming languages!
Peter Norvig: Researchers have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music.
Michael Chabon: If only there were a game, whose winning required a gift for the identification of missed opportunities and of things lost and irrecoverable, a knack for the belated recognition of truths, for the exploitation of chances in imagination after it is too late!
Douglas Haddow: We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us.
The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English | 
