Abstraction: language as a tool for making tools

[jpfed]

When we say that a tool is "easy to use", we could mean a few different things. We could mean "knowing nothing beforehand, I can pick up this tool and figure out quickly how to make it do what I want". Let's call that kind of ease "discoverability". We could also mean "if you know what you're doing, accomplishing what you want is made much

Comments

[jpfed]

I'm not trying to imply that this combination of features is sufficient for not sucking. It has the potential to significantly support the progress of software towards not sucking.

[wenamun]

I like "tempolocal", it's a good addition. If I read it correctly it refers to a span of time, in the negative and positive of our current time, in which an event will occur. So it's especially useful for actions or events that do, or can occur repeatedly. I like it.
As an aside, I've been doing some sci-fi research into AI and computer created languages. One that especially excited me was a computer that's being taught human language as a child learns, through immersion and reinforcement. I wonder if these experiments will eventually make obsolete the bizarre grammatical syntax necessitated in all computer languages by the computer's limitations of language? Just musing. Man, I want to speak to my computer and have Majel Barrett Roddenberry respond in plain english :)

[jpfed]

I like "tempolocal", it's a good addition. If I read it correctly it refers to a span of time, in the negative and positive of our current time, in which an event will occur. So it's especially useful for actions or events that do, or can occur repeatedly.

You read it correctly. There are some events that are so bound to happen that they either already recently happened or will happen very soon, and tempolocal would work for those. I want to say, e.g. the stock market experienced, is experiencing, or will experience serious problems 1 day tempolocal. But that is pretty awkward because of the currently existing English tenses.

One that especially excited me was a computer that's being taught human language as a child learns, through immersion and reinforcement. I wonder if these experiments will eventually make obsolete the bizarre grammatical syntax necessitated in all computer languages by the computer's limitations of language?I have three comments about this

[wenamun]

Yeah, you're right. Maybe this is all just born of my huge and everlasting crush on Majel Barrett Roddenberry. God, what a hottie.
One thing I always find annoying in any computer language (actionscript 2.0 being the one with which I am most familiar) is also the thing I find most interesting (and difficult) about human language, that is syntactic inconsistency. I can't stand when a certain function will take arguments differently, or will structure itself in ways that are out of the ordinary within the framework of the language as a whole. That said, I find irregular verbs to be hilarious, and english's myriad oddities to be quaint and endearing, if not a little frustrating when considering how difficult it can be for non-english natives to learn. Esperanto is definitely consistent, but it's certainly not sexy.