From bob@RATTLESNAKE.COM Wed Jan 23 14:33:39 2002 Return-Path: X-Sender: bob@rattlesnake.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_0_1_3); 23 Jan 2002 22:33:38 -0000 Received: (qmail 52233 invoked from network); 23 Jan 2002 22:33:38 -0000 Received: from unknown (216.115.97.172) by m12.grp.snv.yahoo.com with QMQP; 23 Jan 2002 22:33:38 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO localhost) (140.186.114.245) by mta2.grp.snv.yahoo.com with SMTP; 23 Jan 2002 22:33:20 -0000 Received: by rattlesnake.com via sendmail from stdin id (Debian Smail3.2.0.114) for lojban@yahoogroups.com; Wed, 23 Jan 2002 17:32:19 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 17:32:19 -0500 (EST) To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Cc: bob@rattlesnake.com Subject: Lojban for lay programmers From: "Robert J. Chassell" Reply-To: bob@rattlesnake.com X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=810561 X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 13012 Next week I am going to a workshop sponsored by the Institute for Scientific Interchange, Turin, Italy, http://www.isi.it/summary.html regarding a: ... package--let's call it the "Knowledge Home"--aimed at giving individuals more independence and power in a world increasingly dependent on computers. http://kh.bu.edu/ I am going to suggest Lojban as a possible tool.... The thesis behind the workshop is that everyone has a `home' of some sort, which consists of some culturally defined characteristics, like a kitchen and bedroom, and some personally defined characteristics. The same should apply to computers and software. The metaphorical name for this is a `Knowledge Home'. One of the requirements is that it be easy to `move the furniture' in one's `Knowledge Home'. (It is also necessary that one have the legal freedom to move one's furniture. I have three different ways to contribute to this workshop: software freedom, Emacs Lisp (about which I have just completed the second edition of an introduction), and Lojban, which my sponsor did not know I knew about (and may himself not care for). I was invited to this workshop on account of my knowledge of software freedom and Emacs Lisp.) Another way to present the thesis behind the workshop is that humans, in the Paleolithic and more recently, worked in an edit/fabricate/evaluate cycle. (People do not do this in a world of mass production.) That is to say, a person first figures out what to create, using culturally available templates, such as `bed' or `love letter', then makes the object, and then judges how well or beautifully the created entity fulfills its intention. In the old days, the `fabricate' part of the cycle was difficult and time consuming. Consider how long it took to typeset a book when the job was done by hand. Now, for some things that computers can do, the `fabricate' part is quick and easy. For example, I can now run a program to typeset a 250 page book in 2 1/2 seconds. Nowadays, the editing and evaluation parts of the cycle. are hard and expensive for me. I think of Lojban as potentially more sophisticated for a `scripting' or `verbing' language for the the `Knowledge Home' project than Emacs Lisp or Python. Those are two programming languages that have been mentioned so far as possible `scripting' or `verbing' languages for educated, non-programmers for this project. I think the idea behind the workshop is that the non-programmers would learn to use the language just as ordinary people learn to read musical notation for singing in a church choir. Although I wrote my `Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp' for non-programmers, it does take a certain mind-set or desire to work with the language. I am going to point out that Lojban is (1) able to express everything a natural language does, (2) able to be used (with a subset of the vocabulary, but the same grammar) as a computer scripting language, and (3) able to be recognized by a speech-to-text engine more readily than a natural language, since it is designed to be simple and coherent. (People would converse with their computers -- a goal with which I agree.) So, in theory, if you learn to speak Lojban fluently, you should have no trouble programming with it .... :-) Of course, you _do_ have to learn Lojban, which I have not done yet. Put another way: the choice is between learning a programming language such as Emacs Lisp, or learning a full language..... This may be the down-side of the Lojban idea, since it is much harder to learn a full language than a programming language. On the other hand, if you do learn Lojban, you get a full language out of it, with all that that entails, as well as, hypothetically, a programming language. I am also going to say that so far, the only programming language subset of Lojban that I know about Nick Nicholas' Prolog Parser, from 1993. A great deal of work will be required to turn Lojban into a programming language as well as a spoken language. So I'll call Lojban a `prototype' for this `Knowledge Home' project. Nonetheless, I think that Lojban may be the best tool for the project, at least for the initial phases, assuming the project gets more funding and goes somewhere. Needless to say, all this happens to me after several years during which I have been too busy to pay attention to Lojban. So I have a hard time remembering anything about Lojban. But I will try. -- Robert J. Chassell bob@rattlesnake.com Rattlesnake Enterprises http://www.rattlesnake.com