Re: lojban as a programming language [was Re: [lojban] Lojban for lay programmers]

["Robert J. Chassell" <bob@RATTLESNAKE.COM>]

   > This is where Lojban begins to illuminate programming questions, but
   > as Tommaso Toffoli says:
   >
   >     ... Perhaps its greatest scientific challenge will be not to
   >     confuse the needs and resources of this specialized community with
   >     those of the larger community it addresses.

   Erm, I'm having trouble parsing out the intended meaning of that 
   sentence out of context. 

My apologies.  The context is that of non-programmers.  The fear is
that we will do what I and you want to do, which is focus on issues
of Lojban, and forget others.

   There is a tension between three factors: formalism, expressiveness, and 
   facility. 


Please keep on with this!  I look at myself as being a person bringing
something new to a group who may not care about Lojban but who might
have funding and motivation, which makes this process more than a mere
dream.  

The problem as I see it, is the group will be mostly `old line'
computer people who don't care about speakable languages such as
Lojban.

It is worth figuring out the problems with Lojban as a programming
language (or as many programming languages), since some of these
people will know much more about programming than I and will
immediately think of the problems ... but they will not the benefits.

Indeed, I have a request:  please come up with every problem you can
think of (as well as every advantage).  

Although I expect my level of knowledge will be just right for this
event, I like to have all the `ammunition', to use another metaphor,
that I can have.


   The language should be clean and formally correct,  ...(but as a 
   consequence, expressing interesting things is amazingly verbose). 

Yes, and people, especially programmers, hate the verbose.

   lojban's syntax is arguably a good balance between formalism, 
   expressiveness, and facility. The trick is to get the semantics to be 
   the same.

I agree -- but to convey that thought -- that is more difficult...

   No - don't break one word == one meaning. Computers will want that 
   anyway.  Go through a revision process for the semantics - prototype, 
   ....

OK.  At this stage, I don't think we will get beyond the concept of a
`prototype' anyhow.  (In this case, I used two different meanings of
`prototype', the one being something `you can start from' and the
other being something `that a programmer thinks is very much a
beginning'.)

-- 
    Robert J. Chassell                  bob@rattlesnake.com
    Rattlesnake Enterprises             http://www.rattlesnake.com