A Warrior's Programming Language

BlackNova writes "Var'aq is "a speculative glance at what a programming language on a Klingon computer system would look like." Make sure to read the Preliminary Specification and the Proposed Extensions."

Comments

karma whoring

[einstein]

google's cache of the site
you're welcome
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Re:karma whoring

[sander123]

And here are some
code snippets

(
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:y1Zz_tiIDhI C: www.geocities.com/connorbd/varaq/vcode.html+&hl=en
)

It doesn't make much sense to me, but neither does klingon, so I gues its ok.

Karma whoring...

[wormyguy1]

Here's what part of the page I could get before Geoshitties killed it...

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I enjoy playing with "what-ifs" and that sort of thing. I've written a few fanfics for Star Trek and Babylon 5, and I've got my own grand scifi plan perking through my head (though it won't see the light of day for a long time to come). I've created a couple of languages a la Tolkien and I've run a few role-playing game campaigns. The idea of creating a culture from scratch is utterly fascinating to me, and that is where Var'aq came from.

This page is sort of a speculative glance at what a programming language on a Klingon computer system would look like. The language itself is named var'aq, which happens to be meaningless in standard Klingon but sounds like it might be named after some famous Klingon computer scientist or mathematician. It's really something of a Klingon Basic, a simple, loosely-typed programming language designed mostly just to be used for programming things like command displays and high-level control systems. In its eventual final incarnation, we're looking at concurrency, advanced mathematics, and even native support for distributed programs (try finding that in the C++ standard library).

This page is a bit more than that, though. In it I try to imagine what Klingon hacker culture is like based on what's known about Klingon culture in general. For example, it's a man's world on Qo'noS, Chancellor Azetbur's history-making tenure notwithstanding. Most men are warriors at heart, seemingly taking little heed of home life or those things that do not contribute to honor (why do you think Klingon sex is so rough? Klingon women get so little...). One assumes a rough-and-ready, make-do attitude that assumes that bigger-better-faster is at best a waste of time. A Klingon warrior might love to play Quake once in a while (but wouldn't admit it due to a lack of real blood), but would most likely see the 1GHz Athlon in the box being devoted to realtime, near-photorealistic slamming of texture-mapped polygons to be a dishonorable waste of computer resources. Far better, when you need power, to string a bunch of processors together Beowulf-style, yes?

Var'aq and its accompanying information aren't quite here yet, but until they are you're welcome to send whatever you think might be of interest to this page.

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There is a Google cache here:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:62oDEag2flo C: www.geocities.com/connorbd/varaq/+&hl=en

Since they had a tarball of the interpreter up

[brion]

when I first stumbled on it a year or so ago, I can only assume you didn't actually read very far, and/or were reading in the wrong place.

Re:Kind of pointless

[benjymous]

How about the wayback machine's caches? (as this page has been around since August 2000)

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.geocities. com/connorbd/varaq/

It "fixes" most of the links (a few still sometimes point back to the original site, but often or not a refresh will fix that)

Re:Interesting premise, but...

[Ayende Rahien]

They don't *have* 20 (actually 50) words for snow.
They have specification of snow.
Soft snow, hard snow, dangerous snow, etc.
It's like saying that we have 1000's of words for dog, because there is a word for each race.

Re:var'aq

[pne]

Anyhow, the interesting thing about var'aq is that because it runs on Perl, it's pretty ubiquitous meaning that if you really hate your job and feel the need for revenge, just go rewrite the production administration scripts in var'aq and then quit.

You can get a similar effect by translating your scripts to use a source filter such as Lingua::Romana::Perligata or the newer Lingua::Sinica::PerlYuYan. Read Perl in the original Latin or Middle Chinese!