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

From: "Robert J. Chassell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 23:58:40 +0000 (UTC)

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