alt Hacker NewsI'm always surprised to see that a large enough portion of the HN community are interested in classics that posts like this make it to the front page. Who are you all? What are you doing here?
My undergrad was in classics and viticulture, then did grad school in atmospheric science, which led me to tech and hackernews.
How did you get here?
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I read quite a lot as a kid. Fiction and non-fiction. I'm intensely curious, and the "why" and the "how" of things leads you into new subjects. It doesn't hurt that history is also filled with stories as compelling as most fiction. Much of the old stuff also holds up quite well. Meditations by Aurelius is amazing. Also, Confessions by Augustine of Hippo.
I have many interests but botany became a big one, and the scientific naming scheme is mostly Latin and Greek, which leads to some interesting word history. "Sativa" means anything "cultivated" (example, "Avena sativa" is "cultivated oats" and "Crocus sativa" is "cultivated saffron"). "Nemo" means "no one" (so the "Search for Nemo" is the search for no one, haha), the root word for "service" means "slave". There are many more interesting associations.
I find the deepest and most awe-inspiring truths within physics (out of which biology and chemistry are arguably sort of abstractions in terms of order of complexity). Behind this is a long awkward history of curious people fumbling for answers in the dark. I am an odd nut, but it is connecting in a comforting way the way I can see others have asked the same burning questions of the "how" and the "why" of things, and the myriad subjects it has lead them to.
As John Muir once said: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."
I grew up with an awareness of Greek and Latin as part of western heritage education.
A lot of role playing games, especially from Square Enix,leverage a lot of Latin and classical education.
I became more interested in Latin when learning to sing the Carmina Burana, after already knowing some German and Spanish. I haven't learned much beyond that, but still fascinated by it as with all languages.
I'd think there's a strong correlation. It's a kind of nerd stuff. Greek mythology, classics, train schedules and types, all the space probes and all the NASA stuff, Haskell etc etc. It's all very similar.
Latin in school from 6th grade onward. And a classical education with many holes and gaps that I am continually filling in.
Practicing Roman Catholic family with liberal arts education
I think the answer is that the past is as relevant as the future. If people here know both computer programming and classical history, I think that means they have a more rounded view of the world. (The problem in my part of the world, unfortunately is that classical education has often been class based.)
The thing that strikes me from ancient texts is not the obvious differences from our day, but the similarities.
I'm a recently retired software nerd who got into reading 19th century literature. I was greatly inspired by characters in these novels, most of whom had the advantages of a classical education, and I lamented how poor my own was. One day I idly wondered how hard it would be to learn a bit of Latin (as I was constantly having to look up Latin references) and once I discovered LLPSI[0] I was hooked.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_Latina_per_se_illustrat...