So, You Want To Write Your Own Programming Language?

Chris wendlec at tcd.ie
Thu Jan 23 02:24:21 PST 2014


On Wednesday, 22 January 2014 at 18:46:06 UTC, Walter Bright 
wrote:
> On 1/22/2014 3:40 AM, Chris wrote:
>> Syntax is getting simplified due to the fact that the listener 
>> "knows what we
>> mean", e.g. "buy one get one free". I wonder to what extent 
>> languages will be
>> simplified one day. But this is a topic for a whole book ...
>
> There was this article recently:
>
> http://www.onthemedia.org/story/yesterday-internet-solved-20-year-old-mystery/
>
> about how english is so redundant one can write sentences using 
> just the first letter of each word, and it is actually 
> understandable.

These examples are more about context than redundancy in the 
grammar. This is very interesting, because the burden is more and 
more on the listener and less on the speaker. The speaker can 
omit things relying on the listener's common sense or knowledge 
of the world (or "you know what I mean" skills). In the 
beginning, languages were quite complicated (8 or more cases, 
inflections), but over the centuries things have been simplified, 
probably due to the fact that humans are experienced enough and 
can now trust the "interpreter" in the listener's head.
A good example are headlines. A classic is "Driver refused 
license". Now, everybody will assume that it was not the driver 
who refused the license (default assumption or the _unmarked 
case_). If it were in fact the driver who refused the license, 
the headline would have been different, some sort of linguistic 
flag would have been raised. This goes into the realms of 
pragmatics, a very interesting discipline. Some of the concepts 
found in natural languages can also be found in programming 
languages. I find it extremely interesting how the human mind 
(not just language) is reflected in programming languages.



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