Re: [stack] Advantages of cat, joy ..?

Backing up a bit, to this question:

> So would you rather see the typical Pascal if-then-else statement or "fun1
fun2 arg if-else" ?

Even when faced with reasoned arguments about the simplicity and utility of
the post-fix syntax on the right, almost everyone (outside of this list)
would rather see Pascal.  For many people, in fact, the syntax on the right
is a non-starter.

As Lojban reminds us, reasoned arguments do little to change people's
preferences.  As the old saying goes: in matters of taste, there's no
argument.

However, if you change the conditions, by saying, for example, that this
language is to be used for on-device programming of an iPhone, where the
screen is small and typing is relatively awkward, then you might get a
different answer.  (How many remember programming those old HP calculators?)

By the way, I think my analogies with natural language are flawed.
Shorthand is too harsh, I think, and Textese (SMS chatspeak) is not harsh
enough.

Joe


On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 8:36 AM, William Tanksley wrote:

> Joe Bowbeer wrote:
> > Don Groves wrote:
> > > Once used to this way of actually forgetting about all the
> > > syntax crap, it becomes just as readable, and far more
> > > succinct than any Pascal-like language.
> > Can the same be said of shorthand w.r.t. natural language?  (
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand)
>
> I'm not sure.
>
> > In practice, I think a lot of the extra surface area (redundancy,
> > delimiters, grammatical rules) that is built into popular programming
> > languages (as well as natural writing systems), is there to serve the
> human
> > mind.
>
> That's unlikely. Yes, some of those features were deliberately chosen;
> but most of them were 'chosen' for other reasons than "because it's
> efficient for humans". Ease of parsing drove Pascal's design; it's now
> clear that Pascal's strength is its simplicity, not its particular
> choice of parsers.
>
> Lojban is a constructed language that was designed "entirely" from
> scratch in order to be easily learned and unambiguous. One of the design
> choices was to make it easily parsed, and the implementor chose to make
> the language defined by an LL grammar. The result has been catastrophic:
> in spite of a reasonably strong community, not one person has EVER
> achieved fluency in lojban (according to the community-acclaimed best
> speaker).
>
> Actual human languages are parseable by a structure known as a
> "unification grammar" (to one extent or another), but defining a
> unification grammar takes a LOT of work, and is immensely slow to parse
> (currently). In addition, the linguistic features of unification
> grammars lend themselves poorly to directing machines -- for example,
> ambiguity and multiple meanings are inherent.
>
> > Joe
>
> -Wm


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]