So much for that....

[bucky at phantom.keystreams.com (bucky at phantom.keystreams.com)]

On Fri, 2 Nov 2001, John Tsangaris wrote:

> >true.  To non-programmers, it will always be obvious that programming
> >languages can't be expressive, and there's nothing you could possibly
> >do to convince them otherwise.
> 
> 
> But that's the same as saying because you don't speak spanish, it isn't 
> expressive. Of
> course you can't express anything in a language you do not speak.
> 
> The only difference between spanish and perl is that there are enough 
> people physically
> speaking spanish to make a huge uproar if the government said "spanish is 
> not a recognized
> language, and is not covered under free speech".  Who speaks perl?  Of the 
> 5 geeks (I would
> like to be one of them. :-)  ) that probably speak full time perl in the 
> US, how many of those are
> going to solicit understanding from politicians, and if 100% of them make 
> noise.. who's going
> to hear 5 out of 275,000,000?
> 
> If there was a large enough group of people able to communicate solely via 
> perl (many people
> speak spanish AND english) and still get a concept across, then politicians 
> would be forced to
> accept it as expressive.
> 

Just a little background on me, here - I'm one of those unix/programming
professionals who got into the unix/programming field as part of a
desperate attempt to get away from graduate work.  And, for me, the
graduate work I got away from was linguistics.

So, IMHO, if a group of people started using a programming language to
communicate (only in written form, presumably - I'd hate to have to
pronounce perl), and they really made it work, that would be amazing.  I'm
sure it would blow a lot of people's minds, that a synthetic, "machine" 
language could be used expressively, in exactly the same context as 
natural language.

I think it would also be interesting, because of the evolutionary
pressures that using code communicatively would put on the language
design.  That might be the way to evolve a real natural language interface
for computers.

I don't know, I'm rambling.  But if you're trying to amass a user/speaker
population, count me in.


David