2 Sep
2017
2 Sep
'17
5 p.m.
On 2017-08-31 10:38 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 3:47 PM, Toby Thain
<toby(a)telegraphics.com.au
<mailto:toby@telegraphics.com.au>> wrote:
[snip]
This is why, as our ideas grow in sophistication, our languages must
also. I think the history of mathematical notation is a perfect example.
Lots of people are on this wavelength, e.g. this presentation:
Metaphors We Compute By, Alvaro Videla
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okUmXP1vAic&feature=youtu.be
33 minutes + Q&A
"The main thesis of Lakoff... [is that metaphors] permeate all of the
language, furthermore they dictate in a way how we live, how we see the
world comes from the metaphors ... How our conceptual system is built.
... A metaphor can thus be used to identify a structure in a domain that
would not have been discovered otherwise.
... Master the art of meaning amplication."
This talk also mentions Dr Barbara Liskov's paper, "Programming with
Abstract Data Types":
"The motivation behind the work in very-high-level languages is to
ease the programming task by providing the programmer with a language
containing primitives or abstractions suitable to his problem area. The
programmer is then able to spend his effort in the right place..."
Finally, a favourite quote:
"Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally
for machines to execute" -- Hal Abelson
https://twitter.com/old_sound/status/903919515884544000
--Toby
But the problem was that in those days, because
Wirth had designed it
for complete small student programs, it was hard to write large real
programs (as Brian points). So people fixed it and every fixed it
differently. Pascal was hardly standardized. ...
And this was the root of the real problem.
You could not write “real” programs in it and really make them run on
actual systems. Brian was writing that paper, after an exercise in
Professor Knuth seemed to manage OK, writing TeX and METAFONT in Pascal
(using his literate programming toolset, but that did not extend the
language much).
To be fair, I think that Knuth originally wrote both TeX and METAFONT in
the SAIL language for the PDP-10. He switched to Pascal (again on the
PDP-10) later.
I've often wondered to what extent (natural) language shapes thought;
for instance, to what extent does grammatical gender influence
patriarchy or matriarchy of the society that speaks that language, etc.
If some thought is relatively harder to express in a given language,
will less attention be given to areas associated with that thought? It
is my limited understanding that linguists and social scientists have
studied this and seen a positive correlation between language and
culture/society (I don't know if it's causal).
But if we go out on a branch and assume that it *is* causal for a
moment, it naturally raises the question: is the same true of other
types of languages? How about programming languages or mathematical
notations (or other similar domain specific languages)?
I have long suspected that it is true of programming. ...
- Dan C.