Re: CHAT: proramming langs, was Re: CHAT: OS pain

erg. Okay, now I'm getting heated up.... time for the asbestos :-)

Charles writes:
 > Brook Conner wrote:
 >=20
 > > APIs and programming languages as conlangs....  Thought
 > > that way, most PLs are horribly painful.
 >=20
 > Most programming languages imitate algebra.=20

Hardly. They (or their designers) may claim they do, but aside from
the concept of "variable" (which means something substantially
different in declarative mathematical notation from what it means in
most programming languages), very few PLs have anything in common with=20=

algebra.  The Lambda Calculus (theoretical basis for functional PLs)
has little to do with algebra as widely practiced. Ditto First-Order
Predicate Calculus.=A0And the von Neumann architecture at the heart of
imperative languages has nada to do with algebra.

 > The most extreme
 > I know of that was thinkable-in was APL.=20

A dead language. And what it had in common with algebra had more to do=20=

with having hair-brained things like a symbol for "roots of a
quadratic" than anything else.

 > On another hand,
 > Perl was designed by some one with linguistic training.

Yes, well, Larry Wall can be a frickin Pee Aitch frickin Dee in
linguistics - the syntax and semantics of Perl is still
horrendous. Don't get me wrong - it is clearly a useful tool, but
something that starts out with "mixing sed, awk, and the c-shell" as
where to design syntax? Come on......

 > But the shell script command langs are more "linguistic" than
 > those.

Um, barely.....

 > Basically, verb-objects with some adverbial-prepositional elements.
 > The subject is always "you" and elided. Weird punctuation and anapho=
ra!

Yeah, if you conceptualize the shell as "you", which, at least IME,
programmers do not do (I *certainly* don't). We don't tend to think of
the shell as a conversation.  It's a thing, a machine, and the
commands are the buttons. Lots of buttons. But it isn't conceptualized
as a linguistic language.  What programmers mean by "lexing" has
little to do with linguistic lexemes.

 > GUIs have taken the field temporarily, but I expect a return
 > of the old command-line, in the form of speech-based interfaces.

Erm. Try doing a spreadsheet that way....

 > Now, that's the way to drive a car: "Please drive to work now,
 > not too fast, and play some Grateful Dead." Microsoft just bought
 > the Cambridge technology, it was in the news last week.

Which? Dragon? I missed that if they did - they already basically
owned Lernaupt and Hauspie - I'm surprised if they bought Dragon.

And if you want Microsoft software driving your car, you must have a
death wish :-)

 > > I once considered a variant
 > > syntax for a PL called Self (a lot like Smalltalk) that would enab=
le
 > > something that read like English.  Self, though, lets you redefine=

 > > anything and everything (e.g., you can make true false and change
 > > addition to subtraction).

Just FYI, the syntax Self normally uses would be something like this:

the button is: green AndSays: "boo".

Messages start with lower case, use colons for parameters, and are
continued with upper case. Period is a terminator.

Some simple changes get you much closer to English (if you write your
code reasonably):

The Button is Green and says "boo".

Here, capitalization serves as a kind of scoping marker - caps after a=20=

period is the start of a new message. Not after a  period is a new,
single-word message.

[...]

 > > e) easy to learn
 >=20
 > Really-easy-to-learn implies pidgin, somewhat verbose.
 > No morphology; SVO; all CV or CSV syllables, no diacritics.
 > That's my guess.

Okee-day, my give up. "CSV"?

Brook

---------
THE TOP 15 BIBLICAL WAYS TO ACQUIRE A WIFE

12. Kill any husband and take HIS wife (Prepare to lose four sons,
    though).=20
    - David (2 Samuel 11)

---------
Fancy. Myth. Magic.
http://www.concentric.net/~nellardo/