Re: CHAT: programming langs

Brook Conner wrote:

>  > >  > Most programming languages imitate algebra.
> What sense? "function" and "variable" do not mean the same thing in a
Yeah, I hear you, they're different. But they kinda seem to take a
similar form superficially. FORTRAN meant Formula Translation.
What was a little different was Prolog and, as you mention, some of
the math modelers. But still, not so very human-language-like.

> much less do
> more interesting things to them, like re-arrange terms, take
> derivates, etc. You have to switch to a special-purpose package like
> Mathematica to get that much "algebra."
> What kind of awareness of linguistics are you referring to? String
> processing?  Regular expressions?
Perl had a *little* bit of linguistic awareness ...
I'm not putting it forth as a shining example of a true language.
What I'm thinking about *is* a true language, or at least
a step or two closer to one, which is both humanly speakable
and usable as a replacement for GUI's and the old shells.

> We must have different ideas about what constitutes "linguistic" in a
> PL.  I mean a language that has some of the facilities of human
> language in the areas of discourse, flexibility, and error tolerance.
That's it. We're not really arguing about anything substantive,
I'd like to build something, or maybe just imagine doing so.

> If that's the case, then Emacs Lisp
> For example, the filling algorithm in Haskell:
I know, emacs is capable of everything. Probably one can achieve
spiritual salvation and bliss in it! I use "vi" though.

> Again, I think we have a different conception of what "linguistic"
> means - shell scripts usually have some sort of regular expression
> mechanism built in, but very few spoken languages are amenable to
> regular expressions (lojban is the only one I know offhand).
Right, and I agree that is not the direction to go.

> What's the subject when you use a hammer?  There isn't one that isn't
> yourself. The hammer is a tool, not an agent. Shells are not agents
> (in the linguistic sense) - they are tools.
I think the subject should be the agent, literally;
and the computer should be "animate", not just an instrument.
Peripherals like robot arms or attachments might be instrumental case.

The subject would be a software agent, possibly running remotely;
maybe *verrrrrry* remotely, e.g. in a space probe. There should be
multiple agents on a network or within a machine, like "hey database,
find recent records of ..." where the database engine might be
local or remote or floating (replicated, redundant).

So when in a unix shell we say "program -opt1 -opt2 file1 file2",
the elided subject is "current process on current machine", sort of.
But we should be able to say, "hey mars probe, assume metric
coordinates except when running that stupid xyz program".

> power users don't talk to shells. More, they push the buttons,
You have good ironic potential there ... I always start giggling
when people say "power user" and such ...

>  > Who needs spreadsheets?
>
> Your accountant. Every MBA on the planet. All businesses. Banks. You
> name it.
May they all melt down on Dec 31st and take their suits with them!

> Speech isn't going to supplant guis for the tasks that guis are doing
> today - you aren't going to do much in desktop publishing with a
> speech interface - it would be clumsy, and whether or not it actually
> was slower, users would feel it was slower (odd factoid - keyboard
> shortcuts take *more* time than mousing to a menu - people jsut
> *think* they're shorter because their mind is busy with the keyboard,
> but idle with the mouse).
That's why it hasn't been done already. Yet, it will be.
People like to command, but not to control every little detail.
"Car, start driving. ... Slower. ... North. ... Find food."

> I might use Java to control the stereo or the air conditioner.  But
> not the brakes :-)
Right. Well, we're not up to v1.0 yet, not by a long shot.

--
As they say in Tepa: hike waipettu.