Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language
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@Atazhaia said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
the english names of applications and options
And how discoverable are the alternate IDs that aren't localized?
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@dkf said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
@Atazhaia said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
the english names of applications and options
And how discoverable are the alternate IDs that aren't localized?
Considering that it's Apple we're talking about, there's a good change those doesn't exist. I tried to look up the official documentation for AppleScript, which has a notice of "No longer updated" and refers to macOS as OS X with references to new features introduced in 10.4 and 10.5.
I know that to manipulate programs it's pretty much "In window titled 'x' look for option titled 'y' and set its value to 'z'. So the script I had was looking for the window titled "Preferences" and would fail because in swedish it would be titled "Inställningar". So I only saw my options as either setting the system langue to english, or go through the entire script and localize everything to use the swedish names.
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@Atazhaia said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
Fun fact: An AppleScript written in english, with the english names for applications will fail if the system language is set to something other than english, as it looks for the english names of applications and options.
I think it used to, but it’s now (macOS 10.14 at least) the other way around. With my system language on nl_NL:
tell application "TextEdit" to make new documentresults in a new window in TextEdit, but
tell application "Teksteditor" to make new document -- "Teksteditor" is Dutch localised name for TextEditresults in the dictionary browser to be opened for me to select the application “Teksteditor”. If I don’t, the script gives gives
error "application \"Teksteditor\" kan niet worden opgevraagd. " number -1728 from current application. However, if I do choose Teksteditor from the list in the dictionary browser, it changes the script to readTextEditwhere I putTeksteditorand then runs it (with the expected result).
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@pie_flavor said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
You're missing that song composing and song playing are entirely separate skill sets.
I'd go further and say that both are separate from music theory. There are skilled musicians who know that to play a C#m7/E chord, you put your fingers on certain piano keys or guitar frets, but couldn't explain why that combination of notes is a C#m7 chord or even what that means. There are musicians who create beautiful music but need somebody else to write it down for them, because they don't know what those funny dots and lines mean. There are people who know music theory backward and forward, but couldn't invent an interesting melody to save their life.
(I'm in an unhappy middle ground, where I have some skill in theory, writing and playing, but not enough to do any of them well.)
@Zerosquare said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
few people who compose music use only their head and a piece of paper (or notation software).
Well, mostly I rely on the software to play it back for me. I can plink out notes and try different chords, but to hear how it sounds played at tempo and in context I need the software. Basically, I can't play anything I've ever written.
@Zerosquare said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:If you never had interacted with an actual instrument before, knowing music theory wouldn't help you much.
The local classical music radio station sponsors music days in a museum, mostly targeted at kids, but also open to parents and other adults. They have an "instrument petting zoo" with lots of toy instruments for the kids to play with, but they also have real instruments to try (under careful supervision). A year or so ago, I had the chance to play a cello. I was trying some non-beginner bowing techniques and glissandi and whatnot that I know about from writing music. This led the supervising cellist to think I was a performer, despite this being the first time in my life I had so much as touched a cello — or any other violin-family instrument. (The illusion would have been quickly dispelled by trying to play a simple scale, because I would have failed badly at putting my fingers in the right places to play the notes in tune.)
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@levicki said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
You are all socially awkward, you don't care about others because you believe you are somehow better, you can't listen to anything or anyone except yourself since you are in your own eyes the smartest things to ever grace this Earth.
He's one of us! Welcome to WTDWTF!
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@levicki
None of that makes any sense.
Note the "as contrasted with" part. Computer languages are by definition not natural languages. Natural languages arise in various places organically (as opposed to being constructed for a purpose) by the interactions of people. They're inherently ambiguous, something computer code does not deal with.
INFORM7, from what you posted, is still an artificial language that pretends to be a natural language (in this case English). It isn't. It's an artificial language with all the (specific) syntax rules,
design choices, plus the downside of not being useful outside of one tiny little area.Yes, learning to program confers benefits for learning other languages. But context free "programming skills" aren't such. Just like there are no context-free critical thinking skills. Learning a DSL (and INFORM7 is absolutely, by its own standards, a DSL) over a general-purpose language merely prevents you from learning more-widely-applicable skills.
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@levicki said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
@Benjamin-Hall If computer languages have numerous revisions over time (C++ is at version 17, C# is at version 8 now for example) can you still argue that they are not developing naturally in use much in the same way the "natural" languages evolve over time?
Also, someone sat down invented symbols and wrote down a set of rules for natural language including grammar and syntax and pronunciation. How come is that considered natural instead of artificial development?
To me that's a stupid distinction, anything man made (except children and agricultural produce) is not natural.
You moron. You sanctimonious moron.
A natural language is not constructed by committee. For an artificial language there is an absolute authority on what is right and what is wrong. There is a specification. None of that is true for natural languages.
Linguists describe grammar using rules. They do not prescribe grammar. There is no "correct" or "wrong", except how it is used. Because everyone has decided that "beg the question" means "use circular logic", that's what it means. The only correctness in a natural language lies in the use of that language. There are things we all agree are wrong, but if those changed because people insisted on doing it wrong the language would change, without anyone changing it intentionally. Even with everyone agreeing that the behavior was wrong. Constructed languages don't have this.
And natural languages aren't codified like artificial languages. They're living, changing as people use them. For a computer language, you're restricted by the compiler (and the computer hardware). Natural languages are full of ambiguity--people delight in ambiguity and word play. That's not possible for a computer--they must resolve ambiguity (using rules for that) and frequently get it wrong.
The bold part is just fundamentally, totally, 100% pig ignorant. There was no one who "sat down and invented" the rules for English. Or for Latin. Or for any other natural language. That's the entire point. Not to mention the fact that there is no one-true English language. There are merely a huge collection of dialects that are mutually understandable. There is no central authority. There is no "versions". It's fuzzy and flexible. Computer languages lack this.
This is why NLP is so darn hard and why machine translations suck. If we could reliably program in natural language, we'd be able to translate it and do voice recognition properly. Neither of those are even slightly true. My friend's 18-month old understands English better than Siri and Google Assistant combined, although they have a bigger data bank if they recognize the word.
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@levicki said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
If it were organic and built-in as you claim, then all 7.5 billion of us would speak the same language instead of having hundreds of languages and dialects out of whom many have absolutely nothing in common.
TIL there's only one variety of organic apples. I mean, if there were more than one, they wouldn't be organic.
@Buddy said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
Irrelevant.
It is relevant if you are doing it to make a map.
If you're literally drawing a piece of graphics that's a map - yes. If you're only describing the relative positions of various objects (or group of objects with opaque internal structure) within your game world - not at all.
Hey, I would like natural language programming if it were good, but it isn't.
Why don't you roll up your sleeves and make it better, buddy?
Ah, the classic "you aren't allowed to voice your opinions on movies if you haven't directed one yourself" argument.
@Gąska said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
Surely someone so well prepared for real world programming by playing with Inform7 has no problem filling out the rest.
Says someone toying in Datalog instead of using real language like C.
So Inform7 is a real deal but Datalog is just a toy? Interesting.
How come no one has ever created any non-game software with it? Hell, why are there no non-text-adventure games?
Maybe there is a lack of customizable enough interpreter for it which would allow using it for other stuff except text input and output with some pictures and a map? That has nothing to do with language capability anyway.
The interpreter is an integral part of the language. There is no language without an interpreter - at least not in any practical sense. If the interpreter is useless for anything outside text adventures, then so is the language - at least until someone makes another interpreter that can make the language work for different things. But it hasn't been shown yet that it's possible to create such an interpreter for Inform7.
General purpose programming languages start out with general purpose interpreters. If the Inform7 interpreter isn't general purpose, it's very possible that there's something wrong with the language that makes the interpreter unable to be general purpose.
Expressing yourself in natural language doesn't help when computer doesn't understand it.
After reading endless diatribes and utter confusion sown throughout the threads around here I am sure most of you can't express yourself in ANY language and you know why? You are all socially awkward, you don't care about others because you believe you are somehow better, you can't listen to anything or anyone except yourself since you are in your own eyes the smartest things to ever grace this Earth.
Funny thing - this forum is the only place where I have any trouble expressing myself clearly. Also - don't you think you're making some very far fetching assumptions about people you've never met?
It wasn't "Alpha Centauri is towards the center of (the galaxy of Sol)", it was "Alpha Centauri is (towards the center of the galaxy) of Sol".
Why not just say "towards the center of the Milky Way" and avoid the ambiguity?
Because it would make for a very awkward sentence.
Assuming that everyone knows what you know makes you a pain in the ass to work with.
It also means you write shitty documentation (if you ever write any that is).You're a world class extrapolator. Thinking that random facts about universe are more common than they actually are means that I shit all over my assigned task at work!
It was your own goddamn example. You are to blame for bringing this up.
It was a small part of the whole example.
No, that was the entire example. Go back a few posts and read what you've written.
Okay, bad example
There are some pretty complex games written in it which have combat and turns so I guess it would be doable.
Check the FAQ for more details.FAQ doesn't contain the word "combat". "Some pretty complex games written in it which have combat and turns" is so vague that it's not even possible to tell whether it answers my question, and it makes it sound like you don't even know yourself what Inform7 is capable of and just make up bullshit on the spot in hopes I give up questioning you before you have to admit that the emperor has no clothes.
Regarding your stupid "logical fallacy" bullshit -- no, I am not appealing to authority.
You are literally saying someone's opinion is more valid because they have more achievements. That's very much the definition of appealing to authority.
And just so we are clear. Inform seems to be a very popular language for text adventure makers. And it seems it handles rather complex expressions, as well as allows great flexibility in description of world objects. I'm sure that whoever made it, is an excellent developer as well as computer scientist who understands programming language theory very well. Inform7 is an amazing tool for what it was made for. All I'm saying is that it's useless for anything outside its niche.
Finally, you can write Inform7 in other languages, not just in English.
And they'll read increasingly more awkward the more different they are from English. Not because of English itself - but because of how English has next to no inflection and sentence flexibility, which makes it a perfect candidate for automated interpretation.
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@levicki said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
@Benjamin-Hall If computer languages have numerous revisions over time (C++ is at version 17
...you realize it's a year, not a revision number?
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
Linguists describe grammar using rules. They do not prescribe grammar. There is no "correct" or "wrong", except how it is used.
There are some languages that have committees that attempt to prescribe the language, e.g., l'Académie française. However, as has been pointed out here repeatedly, the people of France mostly ignore l'Académie, their pompous gold-embroidered coats, and their intransigent rejection of anything that even hints of a foreign loan word, and speak French however they bloody well please.
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@HardwareGeek here in Italy we have L'Accademia della Crusca, yet people speak how they damn please because they're either uneducated or because they want to appear modern and smart and street savvy. But the rules are rules. You're expected to abide by them when writing professionally (even though editorial standards are rapidly falling).
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@admiral_p said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
here in Italy we have L'Accademia della Crusca, yet people speak how they damn please because they're either uneducated or because they want to appear modern and smart and street savvy
According to a Genoan of my acquaintance, in Italy it's also important to be speaking differently to your neighbours from the next town over, and doubly so for those people from the other end of the country.
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@levicki said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
You cannot play music without at least some music theory
Do even know there is life on Earth beyond Western Civilization?
You keep spewing ignorant bs like this all the time.
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@Luhmann you don't even have to reach to other civilizations. Just look at guitarists. Notes? Keys? What art thou speakest of? Got my tabs, 's all I need.
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This thread has become exhausting to read even for WTDWTF standards.
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@topspin not surprising - you won't find many programming threads on this programming forum.
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@levicki said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
@Benjamin-Hall If computer languages have numerous revisions over time (C++ is at version 17, C# is at version 8 now for example) can you still argue that they are not developing naturally in use much in the same way the "natural" languages evolve over time?
How does this jive with your claim in another thread that some people don’t speak a natural language properly?
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@dkf due to our history of being a puzzle of ministates every place or town has a dialect, which is not just a regional variation, it's another language altogether. And yes, sometimes it changes within the city limits too. And this leaks into Italian speech too, with local vocabulary and local distortions of language (intransitive verbs becoming transitive for example).
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Anyway speaking as a musician, @levicki is right. You need some music theory to play. It doesn't have to be formal but you need some grasp of the basic concepts. Music theory is not "reading from sheet music", that's just learning notation. By the way, tablatures are a form of notation, one that fits quite well in today's society and for the right genres of music and for guitar (sheet music is very badly suited to strumming and rhythm guitar playing, in my opinion, chord notation on the other hand does not usually provide information on the specific voicing of the chord, inversions and everything else). Sheet music was born in an era of no means of recording and reproducing music, while tablatures allow you to know what to play without having to reimagine the music in your head because you just map what you listen to what you see on the tab (it does away with information such as note length and pauses, which is clutter). Country musicians apparently have their own musical notation too. But notation is like the alphabet. It's not a language. The closest equivalent of languages in music are music "systems" (Western and non-Western systems, of which there are many - this is an ethnomusicologist's area of expertise).
I disagree with the notion that Inform can be considered, at present, anything but a language for IF, because they state it themselves. It was born for that reason, it is successful within that niche (very successful, there are like two or three other languages, but Inform appears to be the most successful by far) and nobody expects it to be used for anything else. That doesn't mean that it's a toy language though, either (it's exactly the other way round, it's a serious and effective tool for making, arguably, "toys"). And it's still a programming language (which also allows for quite the lively game worlds) so I could see how it can be useful. But Python is probably more useful today as a learning tool, especially to people who intend to pursue a career in IT.
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@admiral_p said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
You need some music theory to play.
I'm not convinced by this. It's entirely possible to play without any kind of background learning, as is evidenced by very young children being able to play (if usually not too well). Theory might help, especially with more complex music… but that's not to say it is essential. Actual practice, that is essential as it lets you form the right neural connectivity to enable playing more easily (lots of instruments require you to do different things with each hand in semi-synchrony; that's definitely a learned skill).
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@dkf if you don't know any theory you can learn to play maybe one or two specific styles, through imitation. This is what you see in the ethno-folk music.
It's not very good.
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@admiral_p Shamelessly plagiarising:
plopping any old thing down will often sound better than you expect. It will take years of musical training to understand why it sounds good (or how to make it sound like you want) but you’ve been listening to music your whole life and have picked up the basics by osmosis.
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@levicki said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
you don't have to learn syntax, language keywords, naming rules, etc.
Except yes, you actually do. The interpreter does not actually understand English. It understands specific words in specific order in specific ways. That is a fully formal syntax just like any other programming language. And while given a statement it may be easier to understand what it does due to being derived from English, it does not make it a iota easier to write them given a clean page. You still have to learn which words it understands and how they do it.
@levicki said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
The initial appearance of a door is usually "Nearby [an item described] leads [item described direction]." The description of a door is usually "[if open]It stands open[otherwise]It is closed[end if][if locked] and locked[otherwise] and unlocked[end if]." To say (item - a thing) direction: let place be a random room; let the place be the other side of the item; if the place is visited, say "[way through the item] to [the place in lower case]"; otherwise say "[way through the item]". Instead of attacking a closed door: say "[The noun] reverberates but does not open." Understand "knock on [something]" or "knock [something]" as attacking. Understand the commands "bang" and "tap" and "rap" as "knock". Before printing the name of an open door (called target) when looking or going: if the target is a staircase, do nothing; otherwise say "open ". To decide what direction is the way through (threshold - a door): let far side be the other side of threshold; let way be the best route from the location to the far side, using even locked doors; if way is a direction, decide on the way; decide on inside.To me this is very readable.
Only at first sight. At second, it is utter pain to work with. And for this specific example at multiple levels at that.
Being derived from plain English you kinda understand what the statements do. Except only kinda. The abstraction is leaky and sooner or later you'll run across something where you'll need to look up the minutiae details of how exactly the operations are defined, at which points you'll have to go to the documentation just as if it used symbols instead. Saved no time overall, just delayed it a bit.
And once you learn it, you'll start to be limited by the speed of your eyes and your fingers. You can only recognize so many symbols per second and you can only type so many. So if the keyphrases were abbreviated to symbols, it would be faster to read and faster to write. And clearer, because from the symbols you'd see the overall structure at a glance even without actually reading all the bits inside the blocks.
This specific example is also bad by defining a bunch of aliases for other things. That makes nicer prose, but from the point of understanding what the code does it really horrible.
Programming did not create formalism. Mathematics, physics and chemistry have been using formalisms and special symbols for millennia. Why? Because it is actually much easier to work with once you expend the initial effort to learn the formalism. For example, what is more readable:
T² ∝ a³
or
the square of the period is proportional to the cube of the semi major length
Initially the later, but once you remember that T is orbital period and a is semi major length, the former becomes much easier to read, and especially use in further calculations, not the least because it is much shorter.
Even lawyers do some level of formalization as they strictly use the exact words from the law whenever they mean the thing defined by that law—which is exactly what the example goes against by defining “bang”, “tap” and “rap” as aliases for “knock”.
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@Bulb nobody at least up to the upper-intermediate level uses mathematical notation exclusively. In fact, mathematical statements are usually separated by paragraphs of text which explain and point out stuff. You could say that that's what comments are for, but comments vary wildly in quality. Since high level mathematics is useless to the majority of the population, but IT skills are possibly useful to everybody, it makes sense to make the formalism in computer languages closer to natural language so that your don't depend on commentary. Which is why Ada was deliberately designed to be readable. Which is why Python was deliberately designed to be readable. Etc. (Whether they succeeded or not is relative).
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@admiral_p said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
comments vary wildly in quality
So does the explanatory text accompanying the equations in mathematics texts.
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@dkf which is why few texts are popular. But you buy textbooks for their text. You don't read source code for their comments. You are also supposed to interact with the source code by the way. You are not supposed to interact with the textbook, aside from adding in your own highlighting and comments.
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@admiral_p said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
But you buy textbooks for their text.
Do you? I'm buying them for the equations. Or rather, the abstract mathematical statements that the equations represent.
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@Gąska those equations are everywhere online, free and legal, if you search well enough. I buy texts for, well, both really. Because a maths textbook without maths is stupid, obviously. But you want the information to be laid out and presented as nicely as possible, with enough hand-holding as to make the stuff as clear as possible without overdoing it. Not many textbooks succeed honestly.
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@admiral_p said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
@Gąska those equations are everywhere online, free and legal, if you search well enough.
I should've noted I only ever buy books when I've already searched the internet far and wide and still couldn't find the equations I need. Because there really are topics that are impossible to google up.
The accompanying text is just a bonus. It's nice when it's good, but I've never found it essential for my work. I wouldn't really care if it was missing entirely. I was doing advanced maths for years without ever understanding what all those equations were derived from. Hell, I still don't know what the vector cross product is supposed to be - I only know how to apply it in practice!
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@Gąska I value the didactic aspect of those books. I feel that if you really understand what something does and why and what's the mathematical model behind it you're bound to remember it much longer and be much less prone to mistakes (because mistakes may appear more clearly, eg. results that do not make much sense). Blindly applying algorithms is a recipe for failure.
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@admiral_p said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
@Bulb nobody at least up to the upper-intermediate level uses mathematical notation exclusively
They don't use it exclusively, because they have to define and describe it first. But everybody does use it in the end, because it is unambiguous, concise—even if everybody has to spell it out for themselves to understand it the first time around—and lends itself well to symbolic manipulation done when actually deriving the results.
@admiral_p said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
Since high level mathematics is useless to the majority of the population, but IT skills are possibly useful to everybody, it makes sense to make the formalism in computer languages closer to natural language so that your don't depend on commentary.
That's what programmers already do, using descriptive names for functions and variables instead of single letters in five different fonts like mathematicians. Even the keywords are based on English. But making it sound more natural from that point does not help any more, because it is still just as formal and therefore has to be learned.
Besides, some mathematical skills are just as useful to everybody even more now that our world is governed by accounting and statistics which both require some level of mathematics.
@admiral_p said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
Which is why Ada was deliberately designed to be readable.
It went with the obvious keywords and stuff, and failed.
@admiral_p said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
Which is why Python was deliberately designed to be readable.
It was deliberately designed to be a very different kind of readable. Orthogonal building blocks, not too many of them, simple rules, short syntax for common things (generator comprehensions), abbreviations everywhere. The actual readable. The exact opposite of inform7 (and to large extent of Ada).
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@admiral_p said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
@Gąska I value the didactic aspect of those books. I feel that if you really understand what something does and why and what's the mathematical model behind it you're bound to remember it much longer and be much less prone to mistakes (because mistakes may appear more clearly, eg. results that do not make much sense). Blindly applying algorithms is a recipe for failure.
You should try programming. After some time, blindly applying algorithms becomes your second nature and you become extremely good at it, and are able to create robust, quality applications with very maintainable codebase that's easy to extend with new features necessary to tackle all future problems - all with zero understanding of underlying mechanisms.
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@Bulb Ada really failed, apparently, because compilers were expensive and slow, because the language was hard to implement and because it was closely associated with government (specifically military) work. Plus there is/was a fetish with C-like syntax. If you think about it, (at least it seems to me that) the only popular languages which don't have C-like syntax are those which are much more convenient to use (eg. Python), while some of the most popular ones are Java, C#, JavaScript to an extent, Rust. Delphi was an advanced Pascal dialect that had significant success in the '90s but has since fallen into oblivion.
Mind you, I agree that Inform is unwieldy for large programs. Because it isn't dense enough and symbolic enough.
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@admiral_p said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
Plus there is/was a fetish with C-like syntax.
Not really a fetish - it's just that it doesn't really matter what syntax style you choose, so language designers go with the most common conventions. And it just so happens that C-like languages have always been the most popular ones.
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@Gąska but it didn't use to be like that. You had a wider variety of styles back in the '80s. Back in the '90s you also had Visual Basic (everything was Visual Basic at the time) then VB.NET, which has been overshadowed by C# even though they can, to an extent at least, solve the same issues. So there is a certain preference. Probably because of the fact that a programmer is expected to be able to work in Java, C, C++, C# etc. so maintaining a certain syntax style in more appealing.
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@admiral_p can't speak for the 80s-early 90s, but C# started as a fork of Java, and Java started as a reimplementation of C++ but with garbage collection, and C++ started out as a straight extension of C. So that all these languages mostly share the same syntax has nothing to do with syntax.
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@Gąska said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
a reimplementation of C++ but with garbage collection
… and no operator overloading.
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@dkf said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
@Gąska said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
a reimplementation of C++ but with garbage collection
… and no operator overloading.
Making it useless.
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@topspin said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
@dkf said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
@Gąska said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
a reimplementation of C++ but with garbage collection
… and no operator overloading.
Making it useless.
At least you can make text adventures in it
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@Gąska said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
@topspin said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
@dkf said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
@Gąska said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
a reimplementation of C++ but with garbage collection
… and no operator overloading.
Making it useless.
At least you can make text adventures in it
Java has embedded rules that
A.northOf(B) == B.southOf(A)? TIL.
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@topspin dammit. I was thinking of JavaScript.
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@Gąska That'd be the adventure where you find out if the site is going to render correctly on the client's machine…
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@dkf said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
@Gąska That'd be the adventure where you find out if the site is going to render correctly on the client's machine…
javascript:alert("no")
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@topspin Google is already hard at work to remove this option.
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@Gąska “no” was the answer to “is it going to render correctly”.
Filed under: explaining the joke
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@topspin Google is hard at work on this too. First they've taken over Opera, now they've taken over Edge...
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@dkf said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
@admiral_p said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
You need some music theory to play.
I'm not convinced by this. It's entirely possible to play without any kind of background learning, as is evidenced by very young children being able to play (if usually not too well).
I think you’re both right. Note that I say this as someone who can’t play musical instruments and doesn’t know more about musical theory than can be learned by doing some reading on Wikipedia. However, my experience in other fields is that you’ll pick up theory as you go along, but may not be able to articulate it very well because you didn’t actually learn it as theory.
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@admiral_p said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
@dkf if you don't know any theory you can learn to play maybe one or two specific styles, through imitation. This is what you see in the ethno-folk music.
It's not very good.
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@levicki said in Microsoft debuts Bosque – a yet another pointless programming language:
Or you are saying that you alone could add words and new rules to English willy-nilly and everyone will automatically accept those changes all over the globe?!?
You can't. Exactly because natural languages are organic. Unlike programming languages, which are artificial, and yes, you can alone just add new words and rules to the language willy-nilly and everyone using your language will automatically accept those changes all over the globe.
For an artificial language there is an absolute authority on what is right and what is wrong. There is a specification.
Yet that still doesn't prevent people from writing atrocious code just like they do when writing or speaking natural language and that was also my point.
But it does prevent people from writing code that doesn't conform to grammar rules.
There are things we all agree are wrong, but if those changed because people insisted on doing it wrong the language would change, without anyone changing it intentionally. Even with everyone agreeing that the behavior was wrong. Constructed languages don't have this.
First, those who misuse words and phrases and ignore grammar are the ones who are changing it intentionally so you can't claim it is not intentional with a straight face.
Okay, you can use this alternative meaning of the word "intentional" to corrupt his argument and "prove" it wrong. But then, another trivial argument can be made: a random person without any regulatory power over the language, can freely change a natural language however they want, but they cannot ever change a programming language this way. So natural languages and programming languages are still fundamentally different on this front.
Second, if you really believe there are no "correct" and "wrong" uses in natural language then why are we wasting time and money teaching languages in school, testing students, and giving them "PASS" or "FAIL" grades on linguistic exams?
Kids just won't sit on their rumps all day doing nothing. They have to be occupied with something.
Third, natural language specification itself doesn't (or at least shouldn't) change because someone is too lazy or too stupid (or believes they are too clever) to use it properly.
It does all the time. That's how contractions came to be.
IMO, the way people use language to express their ideas is what changes, and our interpretation of their expression has to change with it if we accept it (which we shouldn't but that's another story). That doesn't mean the language itself has changed because the old stuff is still there and on most occasions during the day you do follow language rules.
This can be trivially proven wrong just by reading just about any piece of text over 300 years old. It's nearly guaranteed to be grammatically wrong - although how much depends on a particular language. English changed the most since the end of medieval period, but others haven't been preserved perfectly either.
For a computer language, you're restricted by the compiler (and the computer hardware). Natural languages are full of ambiguity--people delight in ambiguity and word play. That's not possible for a computer--they must resolve ambiguity (using rules for that) and frequently get it wrong.
Yes, but there are "compiler" rules for formal writing and speaking. You can't use word play and be ambiguous everywhere without consequences -- think of it as a sort of relaxed error checking, by default it is soft-fail (warning instead of error).
It's a nice analogy, but factually it's wrong. Error of any sort in programming language grammar results in statement being impossible to parse and interpret. Error in spoken language grammar isn't just non-fatal, but also almost always fully recoverable.
There was no one who "sat down and invented" the rules for English. Or for Latin. Or for any other natural language.
That is something that can be said for proto-writing as the earliest form of written communication, but even Egyptian hieroglyphs probably didn't arise spontaneously and without some collaboration. Greek alphabet which is based on Egyptian hieroglyphs and all others such as Latin, Cyrillic, etc, derived from it sure look purposefully constructed to me.
You're confusing language and writing. Or maybe you're not confusing it but deliberately mix up the two to conceal your lack of any counterargument.
There is no central authority.
In France there is.
And Frenchmen have them deep up their asses.
There is no "versions". It's fuzzy and flexible. Computer languages lack this.
Computer languages go through deprecation phases and code which compiled on previous version needs to be changed to work on next version before support is finally dropped in next + 1 version. Again, there are more similarities than people are willing to admit.
Maybe, but that's still 0.1% similarity in versioning and evolution process and 99.9% difference.
If we could reliably program in natural language, we'd be able to translate it and do voice recognition properly.
If everyone agreed on using one language and having a standard that would have been possible long time ago.
Note how people have done exactly that for every programming language but have never succeeded in doing that for any natural language.
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@Gurth Jimi Hendrix couldn't read music. He learned music informally and had been a session musician for years before doing his own stuff. Besides, he is one of a kind and one of my favourite guitar players of all time. But to say that he just happened to be a guitar genius by sheer talent and instinct is a misconception.
Jimi Hendrix - Wikipedia
