Subject: Lojban for lay programmers

From: "Robert J. Chassell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 17:32:19 -0500 (EST)

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 [email-masked]
Rattlesnake Enterprises http://www.rattlesnake.com