From me@nellardo.com Thu Jan 24 13:31:20 2002 Return-Path: X-Sender: me@nellardo.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_0_1_3); 24 Jan 2002 21:31:20 -0000 Received: (qmail 52296 invoked from network); 24 Jan 2002 21:31:20 -0000 Received: from unknown (216.115.97.172) by m4.grp.snv.yahoo.com with QMQP; 24 Jan 2002 21:31:20 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail11.speakeasy.net) (216.254.0.211) by mta2.grp.snv.yahoo.com with SMTP; 24 Jan 2002 21:31:20 -0000 Received: (qmail 10872 invoked from network); 24 Jan 2002 21:31:19 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO dsl027-135-047.nyc1.dsl.speakeasy.net) ([216.27.135.47]) (envelope-sender ) by mail11.speakeasy.net (qmail-ldap-1.03) with SMTP for ; 24 Jan 2002 21:31:19 -0000 Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 16:31:18 -0500 Subject: Re: lojban as a programming language [was Re: [lojban] Lojban for lay programmers] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v480) Cc: lojban@yahoogroups.com To: bob@RATTLESNAKE.COM In-Reply-To: Message-Id: Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.480) From: Brook Conner X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=66018878 X-Yahoo-Profile: nellardo On Thursday, January 24, 2002, at 03:05 pm, Robert J. Chassell wrote: [ snip agreement ] > 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. I can think of three "communities" - lojbanistan, computer programmers, and computer users. Which one is the "specialized" community? lojbanistan or programmers? And which is the larger community? programmers or users (I *know* it isn't lojbanistan :-)? If you were to ask me, I'd phrase this differently (or at least, what I think the quote is trying to get at). There is a tension between three factors: formalism, expressiveness, and facility. The language should be clean and formally correct, with a minimum of necessary mechanisms - pure Scheme or the lambda calculus are good examples here, as they have very few mechanisms (but as a consequence, expressing interesting things is amazingly verbose). The language should be powerful and able to express things in many different ways - perl is a good example here, as few claim it is easy to learn and formally it is a mess. And finally, it should be facile, or easy to learn and use - in programming languages, Logo or AppleScript come to mind, which can be learned by children and non-programmers but are usually too stifling for a professional programmer and too messy for the theorist. lojban's syntax is arguably a good balance between formalism, expressiveness, and facility. The trick is to get the semantics to be the same. > But we will need to settle these questions. So we will have to > make the choice. Or do it two different ways, initially, and break > the `single meaning' rule. No - don't break one word == one meaning. Computers will want that anyway. Go through a revision process for the semantics - prototype, alpha, beta, gold. Gold is the equivalent of the Red Book - it doesn't change save for errors. > Right. But can you think of any other potentially speakable > language, suitable for non-programmers, that is better? No, I can't. Brook -- Klactovedestene!