Well, thanks a lot for trying to force your pseudo-mystical spiritualistic dogma on the rest of the Slashdot readership, Mr Pinball Wizard. I bet that all the trolls, as soon as they read your (incredibly well thought-out) post, will immediately start thinking about the consequences of their actions (spouting random nonsense in a public forum) for no other reason than fear of a mythical godlike "force" that will make them pay for it (and who should be believed to actually exist only because a stuck-up better-than-thou "love the community" Karma whore such as yourself says so).
You remind me of the crazy fundamentalists who claim that God ("Karma") will make me go to hell ("get yours eventually") for not believing in the Bible ("behaving like a good Slashdrone").
Stop being an asshole. Stop blaming the trolls for what is really the editors' fault. Stop obsessing about this shit. Get over your infantile delusions of justice from above. Do something about it, if you can see the problem, but stop making these absurd, nonsensical threats.
Prof. Ted Nelson is the guy who invented the modern concept of hyperlinks. He devoted his life and work to the idea of a pefectly designed global repository of hyperlinked objects. Unfortunately, the designed turned out to be a white elephant; OTOH, when the WWW was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, it was just poor and broken enough that the worse-is-better gang who runs things would adopt it as a suitable lowest common denominator. Nelson never got the recognition he deserved, and lost his funding. Finally, in 1998 (IIRC) he resorted to opening the existing sources of Xanadu software; it's now available as Udanax (here. Sadly, that seems to have gone nowhere either.
Hi, I'm your friendly neighbourhood Fascist Moderator at osOpinion. What happened, in few words: the site used to be affiliated with Maximum PC; then Kelly McNeill, our editor-in-chief, got a better offer from the NewsFactor Network. A few weeks ago, we switched, and the NewsFactor people came up with this new portal-like look. I personally would like a pure-text alternative look (like/.'s "Light" option), but you can't have everything...
I'm currently working on ObjectSim, a minimalist OO language based on transparently accessing remote object stores through pattern matching. Its design is quite unlike that of most other languages, I suppose the "feel" is more akin to that of, say, SQL or other stereotypical "4GLs" than of "traditional" programming languages. This is despite ObjectSim being Turing-complete.
I have a more complete description of ObjectSim, and the first implementation (on Scheme, and still using s-expression syntax) is slated for later this month. We're discussing it (amongst other things) on the Cat's Eye mailing list.
Oberon is an OS and language, combined. I don't know enough about it to provide any greater detail.
Okay, let's see. First of all, it's available for download here, if memory serves me right. It runs as an application under Windows, Mac OS and Linux, as well as natively on PCs and on the ETH's own architecture.
For those who haven't programmed in Modula: it feels quite a bit like Pascal. But in a good way. It's high(er)-level, safe(r), "really" OO - all those things that C/C++ isn't. It's a joy for programming big systems, although a bit cumbersome for small ones - you do find yourself wishing you were using Perl. The OS itself is quite different from anything I'd ever used before, both its UI (not window-based, rather more reasonable, and I suppose it'd be easier to learn for a newbie, but I'm addicted to this damned WIMP paradigm, so I had a hard time with it) and its guts (it's a truly open system; everything is a module, written in the same language, communicating directly through the language primitives - no need for dumb-ass IPC, marshaling or "lowest common denominator" file formats; it reminds me a bit of Symbolics' Genera OS that ran on Lisp Machines).
I can't really say much more about it, but I do recommend that the reader downloads it and tries it out for himself.
Computationally, this argument makes no sense. Basically, any program in a functional language can be written in an imperative one (otherwise one wouldn't be able to implement, say, Haskell in a regular computer). Sure, some programming idioms may fit the functional style better, but others come more naturally as imperative, and for these algorithms, an imperative language is more expressive. I feel that this is usually the case in applied number theory, in which algorithms naturally involve a lot of iteration, assignment, global variables and whatnot). Try to implement, say, Blowfish (or whatever) on Haskell (pure functional) and Eiffel (imperative with constraints), and Haskell advocates' "executable specification language" buzz suddenly doesn't sound so good anymore. (Don't get me wrong, I'm myself a big advocate of declarative programming. It's just not the Holy Grail.)
So, even if the US law people are ignorant enough to consider an algorithm's description in English as protected speech while that same algorithm's implementation in an actual programming language is outlawed (which wouldn't surprise me, coming from a country where there were export restrictions on the PGP sources in digital form but it was OK to print and publish worldwide a book containing nothing but these same sources in printed form), I don't think that it'd make a whole lot of a difference for the people who make these decisions whether the language used in the implementation is statement- or expression-oriented. Even if it does, however mildly, look like mathematical notation.
(Hrrrm. Wonder if the new language on which I'm working, whose concrete syntax translates to and from AMS-TeX and therefore can be typeset indistinguishably from actual math, would be an advantage, then.)
I know this may be a confusing concept for you to cope with, but you see, as the Earth rotates around its axis, the part of it which is illuminated by the Sun changes constantly. So when it's the middle of the night where you are, in many other places it's the middle of the day, and a lot of people there are reading Slashdot. By the time those people are sound asleep in the middle of the night, you'll be studying or at lunch or posting to Slashdot or something; when you're doing this, remember: the time of day varies depending on where you are.
I know that understanding it fully is too much to ask from you, but please give it a try so that, even if you do remain stupid, at least you won't sound like you are anymore.
As usual, I'm one step ahead of the rest of Slashdot:) While creating an IDE for the 2-D tarpit language Orthogonal, I had some quite freaky ideas, and I'm putting them together into something I call PORTUGOL. It's based on the grid rewriting paradigm, 2-D, mostly graphical (non-ASCII, designed to be used under an IDE) and very unfamiliar altogether to those used to "orthodox" languages like C and Pascal. However, one of its many interesting peculiarities is that all identifiers and names, as well as the IDE itself, is in Portuguese. Granted, this by itself isn't much, considering that Portuguese uses the Latin alphabet just like English, but the combination of Portuguese text and comments with the language-specific glyphs that basically make up a suplementary "alphabet" in and of itself... it's quite interesting.
PORTUGOL has been focused, lately, on educational goals. Oddly, I've presented an alpha version to some (Portuguese-speaking) college kids with some advanced math knowledge but no programming experience, and they've taken it to it quite easily; with my help, they grokked most of the system in a couple of hours. This is excellent time, especially compared to the ye^H^Hmo^H^Hwe^H^Hdays it takes for one to learn rudimentary C.
Compare
-- functional pseudocode: using a high-level language with a dynamic object system and built-in facilities, search entire environment and remote hosts for urgent documents which have been modified today
let docs = [ doc from World | doc:: Document and doc.modification_date MEDIUM ]
in display_numbered_list(docs)
>> ask_user("Document number: ")
>>= \n -> docs[n].display_nicely;;
to
-- quasi-functional pseudocode: using a high-level language without a dynamic object system but with CORBA bindings, search entire environment and remote hosts for urgent documents which have been modified today
namespace An_Arbitrary_Protected_Namespace;;
use ORBs_Special_Namespace;;
use Document_Class_Skeleton;;
use Special_Class_For_Object_Reference;;
use Special_Class_For_Object;;
let orb = implem_dependent_initialise_orb(lots_of_params)
in do orb.implem_dependent_initialise_boa(lots of other_params)
>> orb.get_naming_service -- if orb.supports_naming_service
>>= \ns -> filter (\s -> s.query("BIZARRE_QUERY_IN_THIRD_PARTY_LANGUAGE: DOES THIS SERVER CARRY OBJECTS OF TYPE Document?").cast_to_boolean) ns.all_hosts
>>= \hs -> map (\h -> h.all_object_refs) hs
>>= \refs -> filter (\ref -> ref:: Reference(Document) and ref->modification_date.compare(YESTERDAY.cast_to_i nteger) and doc.urgency.compare(MEDIUM.cast_to_integer) refs
>>= \refs -> do
map (\r -> display_list_item(r->title)) refs
>> ask_user("Document number: ")
>>= \n -> refs[n]->display_nicely;;
A few other comments:
it's been around forever
"Since the late 80s/early 90s" =/= "forever". In any case, why not try and invent something new and potentially better, rather than to stick with an old and potentially obsolete method? "Reinventing the wheel" is worth doing if the wheel already invented is square.
carefully maintained
What do you mean by this? Are you talking about OMG's formal description of the architecture? Or about each ORB's code? Or about each CORBA program's code?
I would suggest going with CORBA as opposed to creating Yet Another custom inter-process communication mechanism
But the original poster doesn't want an IPC mechanism - he understands that today's heavyweight processes should be abolished altogether. All the conceptual overhead added by CORBA's architecture is just not worth it, any more than it is using it in a self-contained program.
Are you guys sure you got the right URL? Did you even bother to check it? All I got was a page offering subscriptions to a bunch of Win2K newsletters.
I haven't read the story, for obvious reasons, but in any case, given the source - Win2K Mag - and the target - Linux's popularity in a market which is very much of Microsoft's interest, gaming desktops - I'd be just a little bit suspicious of bias, twisting words and just generally bad journalism. Then again, I'm paranoid.
Congratulations, you've just reinvented Genera. Or Squeak, if you like "objects" better than "functions", or if you want to run it on top of an existing OS, or if you don't want to be tied to a specific (dead) hardware architecture. And ETH Oberon is yet another OS based on the same ideas. In any case, that you don't see it everywhere doesn't mean it hasn't been invented yet - and that it's (not) popular doesn't mean it's (not) good. (For the first case, see Haskell - "groundbreaking" parametric polymorphism in the late 80s; for the second case, see Windows.)
In any case, it will do you no good to use CORBA as it is today. Instead, use a dynamic, high-level language for user-level functionality, and just let applications people deal with objects in the language's natural idiom, making no syntactic distinction between "local" and "remote" objects.
In any case, have fun, and don't let those Unix weenies tell you that systems research is dead - if it were for the conformists and the naysayers, we'd be rendering polygons with abaci!
Re:Programmers who enjoy coding so much...
on
A Praise To Unix
·
· Score: 2
Slimebolics "historical" Lisp Machine? I learned (and loved!) Lisp (on a unix machine:) before any hardware Lisp Machine ever existed.
Hrrrrm. I wasn't aware that there had been Lisp systems for Unix before the early or mid-80s, and definitely not before 1975 when the first Cons machine was built. In fact, I thought the first compiler for Unix outside of C and PDP assembly had been the Berkeley Pascal compiler, from (IIRC) 1977. Strange timing, eh?:)
That's why I quoted "historical"...
By "historical" I meant that it made history, being years ahead of its time (and only comparable to the Xerox PARC's inventions such as the Alto). In one way or the other, the Lisp Machines did pretty well (in the US and Europe at least) before the big AI bust of the 80s, but now they've been relegated to museums and dusty office corners - at best - and their design lessons have been forgotten by the industry (who is now busy reinventing it, only twenty years late and in a half-assed manner - see Sun's MAJC and Transmeta's Crusoe).
but in all my days I've never seen any coder quoting "coding", as you did.
Well, to be honest, the term "coding" bugs me a bit. I translate it in my head to the Portuguese "codificar" (I'm Brazilian), which is associated with negative notions: making things arcane and undecypherable. I like to think my code isn't arcane and undecypherable - unless specifically intended otherwise - so I prefer "programming", "hacking" or just "algorithm designing":) It's nothing rational or purposeful, just a pet peeve of mine.
Programmers who enjoy coding so much...
on
A Praise To Unix
·
· Score: 2
Programmers who enjoy coding so much that they'll do it for free like to use unix, and not Windows.
*ahem* Excuse me, but I think someone forgot to send me the invitation to your crowning ceremony. FYI, I am a programmer, and I enjoy "coding" so much that I do it for free (I design programming languages on my spare time). However, I do not like Unix. In fact, it's fair to say that I hate it. (Just to keep you from accusing me of being a mindless Microsoft drone in a while: I also hate Windows.) I also hate C, vi and a bunch of other things that Unix zealots seem to believe to be the be-all, end-all of software. (When Rob Pike's article bemoaned the current state of systems research, and a bunch of people claimed that systems research should be stopped, being useless given that the ultimate system already existed in the shape of Unix... that was when I truly realised the sad state of our little community.) I've seen better things - I've seen truly open systems, built without preconceptions and making all the power of the machine available to the user, such as Symbolics' historical Lisp Machine OS, Genera. Compared to it and others, Unix's continued prevailance can only be explained by the influence and domination of the "worse-is-better" mentality in the IT industry. I hope that goes away in due time.
Besides from all that, there's a big error in your argument. You see, Free Software is "free" as in speech; it doesn't mean that people don't get paid for programming. I myself work on Free Software for a living, as do many fellows at Red Hat, Conectiva, IBM, Apple and many other companies. These people write Free Software, but they do unto it as management tells them to. If or when their numbers and power in the GNU/Linux community exceed those of "lone hackers", it won't be the programmers' choice any more, but that of the consumers - the people who pay for the software to be written, one way or the other.
Seriously, how did she get to be a wealthy spokesperson/trendsetter for the tech set?
Connections. Hahvahd, dahling.
She sounds like she knows what she's talking about - at least just enough to get the PHBs into dummy mode.
The 70s/80s "chick trick".
Essentially, though, every majority needs a "guru", and the PHBs can't have it be an actual engineer or scientist, so they just picked someone who sounded really good for the job.
I've read some of her stuff, it's bland, vague prognisticating.
One day when you feel hyper-active, compare "Release 2.0" to our own Bill Gates' "Business @ the Speed of Thought". See if it rings a bell.
And people shell out triple digits to subscribe to this, and pay lots of money to go to her seminars.
Even worse - she's the Big Boss of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and thus effectively the Absolute Monarch of the Internet! Under Queen Dyson's rule, the state of the Internet worldwide has gone from already bad to downright catastrophic.
What happens if you feed that program disimilar styles of music, say Metalica, Portishead, and Beatovens 9th?
It fails to find any kind of meaningful consistency, the ATN's knowledge base becomes underpopulated, and the final product is utterly bland and devoid of content. (Wow, so that's how they compose new songs for Britney Spears records!)
By the way... Beatovens? That's a damned cool name for a band! I've got dibs on it!
Also, if I feed the same songs in again do I get the same song out the system a second time, or is it just the same song as the first time?
No, the generative part of the process is randomised, so you merely get a different song in the same style. Look at the example MIDIs in the EMI web pages; there are a handful of generated Nocturnes in there, IIRC, and they're all different.
Been there, done that. David Cope has devised a symbolic AI program in Lisp called Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI), based on the linguistic technique of augmented transition networks (ATNs).
Basically, you feed the program a set of pieces in the same style (say, Beethoven sonatas or Bach cantatas or Chopin Nocturnes), it processes them, abstracts from them the defining characteristics of this style and then proceeds to recombine them to create a new piece which, while noticeably different from all the the originals, can often easily pass for one of them.
I take it you've never heard of David Cope's work. Cope is a rather well-known contemporary composer, as well as a great computer scientist in his field. He has devised a symbolic AI program in Lisp called Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI), based on the linguistic technique of augmented transition networks (ATNs).
Basically, you feed the program a set of pieces in the same style, it processes them, abstracts from them the defining characteristics of this style and then proceeds to recombine them to create a new piece which, while noticeably different from all the the originals, can often easily pass for one of them.
Sure, music has "soul"; it just so happens that this "soul" is mathematically representable. That doesn't make it any less important.
When he finished, he realized that the comments were much, much longer than the code they attempted to describe.
(Oddly enough, I just had a similar discussion in DALNet #perl. I'll be a good programmer, then, and practice code (example) reuse.)
I remember that post on PM too; I disprove it thus.
"This is left as an exercise to the reader": write a Perl module Math::MB, such that, after
use Math::MB;
tie($m, 'Math::MB');
$t contains the Mandelbrot set. The length of Math::MB must be strictly smaller than the following description of the Mandelbrot set:
Definition. Let Z_1_(c) = 1, Z_n_(c) = Z_n-1_(c)^2 + c; then M = { c e |C | lim_n->oo_ Z_n_(c) * oo }.
(_foo_ denotates a subscript; oo denotates infinity.)
(Thus it is proved that, however concise Perl may be, mathematics is even more so.;) Seriously, even if I expand the above formula to its textual correspondent, it'd still be much shorter than it could be expressed in any algorithmic language, because these are languages for computation, not for mathematical abstraction.
My point is that the same thing applies to poetry. It shouldn't be described in terms of the pure textual size of its written form, but in terms of the "size" of the symbolic structure that the reader gathers from reading it. Perl can represent, e.g., pattern-matching, array looping and I/O, concisely because that's all that a Perl program does; there's no additional level of significance to the "text" that is Perl code, so the issue is merely one of Perl syntax vs. English syntax. However, ideas that are easily expressed in a "real" language like English, to a human, such as the concept of limits, the concept of a set, and the concept of a logic variable, have no reasonable equivalent in Perl programming.
Thus, Perl may be beautiful, but it's no poetry.;)
Those who did seemed to assume that copyright didnt' apply at all, and stole Napsters logo just to make a profit.
Napster's logo is trademarked, not copyrighted. It's a whole different set of legislation. If somebody uses the Napster logo to make money, they are forced to throw their lawyers at it, lest trademark dilution take place and angry shareholders chase Hank Barry around armed with threatening-looking staplers and ballpoint pens.
Well-put. Semantics is the issue, not syntax. As for your examples, well, being able to understand them fully and comply with them appropriately would require nothing short of real AI, but a lesser version is actually much more simple (although still complex) to create once we're assuming to be operating in a free-object environment and allow for some heuristics, both built-in and user-definable.
Examples in a theoretical language with Lispy syntax but declarational, constraint-based syntax and built-in simple non-determinism (like what Prolog provides):
Open my wedding photos. (let (((s in Photo-sets) | (contains? (label s) "wedding"))) (display-photo (p in s)))
Spell-check the latest draft of my current novel. (let* (((n in Novels) | (for-all (n' in Novels) (not (more-recent? (creation-date n') (creation-date n))))) (D (Drafts n)) ((d in D) | (for-all (d' in D) | (not (more-recent? (modification-date d') (modification-date d)))))) (spell-check d))
"When did I receive an e-mail from my publisher with 'foo' in the subject?" (let (((n in Address-book) | (contains? (comments n) "publisher")) ((e in (/ Messages Received)) | (and (eq? (field e 'From) n) (contains (subject e) "foo"))) (date e))
(Written in Netscape's stupid little textarea box, so if I made any parenthesising mistakes, please let me know.)
Such a natural-language shell wouldn't have to reproduce the semantics of English (or whatever other language, whether natural or synthetic like Lojban), but only enough as deemed useful for expressing tasks to the computer. It would, in essence, still be a programming language, only with a syntax which is less arcane.
As for the "dynamic" part... well, let's take Perl as an example. Perl is nowhere near as expressive as natural language, and it definitely doesn't resemble any of those syntax-wise. But it's got a lot of shortcuts. For example, the word "it" is represented by the variable $_. Many built-in functions, when they receive no argument, will assume that $_ is to be manipulated. For example, $o = int; is equivalent to $o = int $_;. As an extreme case, print; is equivalent to print STDOUT $_;.
This kind of thing, only extrapolated a bit, and with some added heuristics and user interaction history management, will make a NL shell perfectly useable most of the time, without having to reproduce the semantics of natural languages in full.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, thanks a lot for trying to force your pseudo-mystical spiritualistic dogma on the rest of the Slashdot readership, Mr Pinball Wizard. I bet that all the trolls, as soon as they read your (incredibly well thought-out) post, will immediately start thinking about the consequences of their actions (spouting random nonsense in a public forum) for no other reason than fear of a mythical godlike "force" that will make them pay for it (and who should be believed to actually exist only because a stuck-up better-than-thou "love the community" Karma whore such as yourself says so).
You remind me of the crazy fundamentalists who claim that God ("Karma") will make me go to hell ("get yours eventually") for not believing in the Bible ("behaving like a good Slashdrone").
Stop being an asshole. Stop blaming the trolls for what is really the editors' fault. Stop obsessing about this shit. Get over your infantile delusions of justice from above. Do something about it, if you can see the problem, but stop making these absurd, nonsensical threats.
Believe it or not, the main goal of the people who build these supercomputers is not to get into the Top 500 List.
;)
In other words, the engineering part is more important than the popularity-contest, awe-factor part.
Compare and contrast with the "open source" software community...
Prof. Ted Nelson is the guy who invented the modern concept of hyperlinks. He devoted his life and work to the idea of a pefectly designed global repository of hyperlinked objects. Unfortunately, the designed turned out to be a white elephant; OTOH, when the WWW was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, it was just poor and broken enough that the worse-is-better gang who runs things would adopt it as a suitable lowest common denominator. Nelson never got the recognition he deserved, and lost his funding. Finally, in 1998 (IIRC) he resorted to opening the existing sources of Xanadu software; it's now available as Udanax (here. Sadly, that seems to have gone nowhere either.
Hi, I'm your friendly neighbourhood Fascist Moderator at osOpinion. What happened, in few words: the site used to be affiliated with Maximum PC; then Kelly McNeill, our editor-in-chief, got a better offer from the NewsFactor Network. A few weeks ago, we switched, and the NewsFactor people came up with this new portal-like look. I personally would like a pure-text alternative look (like /.'s "Light" option), but you can't have everything...
I'm currently working on ObjectSim, a minimalist OO language based on transparently accessing remote object stores through pattern matching. Its design is quite unlike that of most other languages, I suppose the "feel" is more akin to that of, say, SQL or other stereotypical "4GLs" than of "traditional" programming languages. This is despite ObjectSim being Turing-complete.
I have a more complete description of ObjectSim, and the first implementation (on Scheme, and still using s-expression syntax) is slated for later this month. We're discussing it (amongst other things) on the Cat's Eye mailing list.
Wow! I have my own impostor now! I'm so fucking honoured!
Oberon is an OS and language, combined. I don't know enough about it to provide any greater detail.
Okay, let's see. First of all, it's available for download here, if memory serves me right. It runs as an application under Windows, Mac OS and Linux, as well as natively on PCs and on the ETH's own architecture.
For those who haven't programmed in Modula: it feels quite a bit like Pascal. But in a good way. It's high(er)-level, safe(r), "really" OO - all those things that C/C++ isn't. It's a joy for programming big systems, although a bit cumbersome for small ones - you do find yourself wishing you were using Perl. The OS itself is quite different from anything I'd ever used before, both its UI (not window-based, rather more reasonable, and I suppose it'd be easier to learn for a newbie, but I'm addicted to this damned WIMP paradigm, so I had a hard time with it) and its guts (it's a truly open system; everything is a module, written in the same language, communicating directly through the language primitives - no need for dumb-ass IPC, marshaling or "lowest common denominator" file formats; it reminds me a bit of Symbolics' Genera OS that ran on Lisp Machines).
I can't really say much more about it, but I do recommend that the reader downloads it and tries it out for himself.
Computationally, this argument makes no sense. Basically, any program in a functional language can be written in an imperative one (otherwise one wouldn't be able to implement, say, Haskell in a regular computer). Sure, some programming idioms may fit the functional style better, but others come more naturally as imperative, and for these algorithms, an imperative language is more expressive. I feel that this is usually the case in applied number theory, in which algorithms naturally involve a lot of iteration, assignment, global variables and whatnot). Try to implement, say, Blowfish (or whatever) on Haskell (pure functional) and Eiffel (imperative with constraints), and Haskell advocates' "executable specification language" buzz suddenly doesn't sound so good anymore. (Don't get me wrong, I'm myself a big advocate of declarative programming. It's just not the Holy Grail.)
So, even if the US law people are ignorant enough to consider an algorithm's description in English as protected speech while that same algorithm's implementation in an actual programming language is outlawed (which wouldn't surprise me, coming from a country where there were export restrictions on the PGP sources in digital form but it was OK to print and publish worldwide a book containing nothing but these same sources in printed form), I don't think that it'd make a whole lot of a difference for the people who make these decisions whether the language used in the implementation is statement- or expression-oriented. Even if it does, however mildly, look like mathematical notation.
(Hrrrm. Wonder if the new language on which I'm working, whose concrete syntax translates to and from AMS-TeX and therefore can be typeset indistinguishably from actual math, would be an advantage, then.)
At this hour. Slashdot is being read :-)
I know this may be a confusing concept for you to cope with, but you see, as the Earth rotates around its axis, the part of it which is illuminated by the Sun changes constantly. So when it's the middle of the night where you are, in many other places it's the middle of the day, and a lot of people there are reading Slashdot. By the time those people are sound asleep in the middle of the night, you'll be studying or at lunch or posting to Slashdot or something; when you're doing this, remember: the time of day varies depending on where you are.
I know that understanding it fully is too much to ask from you, but please give it a try so that, even if you do remain stupid, at least you won't sound like you are anymore.
As usual, I'm one step ahead of the rest of Slashdot :) While creating an IDE for the 2-D tarpit language Orthogonal, I had some quite freaky ideas, and I'm putting them together into something I call PORTUGOL. It's based on the grid rewriting paradigm, 2-D, mostly graphical (non-ASCII, designed to be used under an IDE) and very unfamiliar altogether to those used to "orthodox" languages like C and Pascal. However, one of its many interesting peculiarities is that all identifiers and names, as well as the IDE itself, is in Portuguese. Granted, this by itself isn't much, considering that Portuguese uses the Latin alphabet just like English, but the combination of Portuguese text and comments with the language-specific glyphs that basically make up a suplementary "alphabet" in and of itself... it's quite interesting.
PORTUGOL has been focused, lately, on educational goals. Oddly, I've presented an alpha version to some (Portuguese-speaking) college kids with some advanced math knowledge but no programming experience, and they've taken it to it quite easily; with my help, they grokked most of the system in a couple of hours. This is excellent time, especially compared to the ye^H^Hmo^H^Hwe^H^Hdays it takes for one to learn rudimentary C.
Anyone interested in PORTUGOL can email me here and/or join the Cat's Eye Language List.
Compare
:: Document and doc.modification_date MEDIUM ]
;;
;;
;;
;;
;;
;;
:: Reference(Document) and ref->modification_date.compare(YESTERDAY.cast_to_i nteger) and doc.urgency.compare(MEDIUM.cast_to_integer) refs
;;
-- functional pseudocode: using a high-level language with a dynamic object system and built-in facilities, search entire environment and remote hosts for urgent documents which have been modified today
let docs = [ doc from World | doc
in display_numbered_list(docs)
>> ask_user("Document number: ")
>>= \n -> docs[n].display_nicely
to
-- quasi-functional pseudocode: using a high-level language without a dynamic object system but with CORBA bindings, search entire environment and remote hosts for urgent documents which have been modified today
namespace An_Arbitrary_Protected_Namespace
use ORBs_Special_Namespace
use Document_Class_Skeleton
use Special_Class_For_Object_Reference
use Special_Class_For_Object
let orb = implem_dependent_initialise_orb(lots_of_params)
in do orb.implem_dependent_initialise_boa(lots of other_params)
>> orb.get_naming_service -- if orb.supports_naming_service
>>= \ns -> filter (\s -> s.query("BIZARRE_QUERY_IN_THIRD_PARTY_LANGUAGE: DOES THIS SERVER CARRY OBJECTS OF TYPE Document?").cast_to_boolean) ns.all_hosts
>>= \hs -> map (\h -> h.all_object_refs) hs
>>= \refs -> filter (\ref -> ref
>>= \refs -> do
map (\r -> display_list_item(r->title)) refs
>> ask_user("Document number: ")
>>= \n -> refs[n]->display_nicely
A few other comments:
it's been around forever
"Since the late 80s/early 90s" =/= "forever". In any case, why not try and invent something new and potentially better, rather than to stick with an old and potentially obsolete method? "Reinventing the wheel" is worth doing if the wheel already invented is square.
carefully maintained
What do you mean by this? Are you talking about OMG's formal description of the architecture? Or about each ORB's code? Or about each CORBA program's code?
I would suggest going with CORBA as opposed to creating Yet Another custom inter-process communication mechanism
But the original poster doesn't want an IPC mechanism - he understands that today's heavyweight processes should be abolished altogether. All the conceptual overhead added by CORBA's architecture is just not worth it, any more than it is using it in a self-contained program.
Are you guys sure you got the right URL? Did you even bother to check it? All I got was a page offering subscriptions to a bunch of Win2K newsletters.
I haven't read the story, for obvious reasons, but in any case, given the source - Win2K Mag - and the target - Linux's popularity in a market which is very much of Microsoft's interest, gaming desktops - I'd be just a little bit suspicious of bias, twisting words and just generally bad journalism. Then again, I'm paranoid.
Congratulations, you've just reinvented Genera. Or Squeak, if you like "objects" better than "functions", or if you want to run it on top of an existing OS, or if you don't want to be tied to a specific (dead) hardware architecture. And ETH Oberon is yet another OS based on the same ideas. In any case, that you don't see it everywhere doesn't mean it hasn't been invented yet - and that it's (not) popular doesn't mean it's (not) good. (For the first case, see Haskell - "groundbreaking" parametric polymorphism in the late 80s; for the second case, see Windows.)
In any case, it will do you no good to use CORBA as it is today. Instead, use a dynamic, high-level language for user-level functionality, and just let applications people deal with objects in the language's natural idiom, making no syntactic distinction between "local" and "remote" objects.
In any case, have fun, and don't let those Unix weenies tell you that systems research is dead - if it were for the conformists and the naysayers, we'd be rendering polygons with abaci!
Slimebolics "historical" Lisp Machine? I learned (and loved!) Lisp (on a unix machine :) before any hardware Lisp Machine ever existed.
:)
...
:) It's nothing rational or purposeful, just a pet peeve of mine.
Hrrrrm. I wasn't aware that there had been Lisp systems for Unix before the early or mid-80s, and definitely not before 1975 when the first Cons machine was built. In fact, I thought the first compiler for Unix outside of C and PDP assembly had been the Berkeley Pascal compiler, from (IIRC) 1977. Strange timing, eh?
That's why I quoted "historical"
By "historical" I meant that it made history, being years ahead of its time (and only comparable to the Xerox PARC's inventions such as the Alto). In one way or the other, the Lisp Machines did pretty well (in the US and Europe at least) before the big AI bust of the 80s, but now they've been relegated to museums and dusty office corners - at best - and their design lessons have been forgotten by the industry (who is now busy reinventing it, only twenty years late and in a half-assed manner - see Sun's MAJC and Transmeta's Crusoe).
but in all my days I've never seen any coder quoting "coding", as you did.
Well, to be honest, the term "coding" bugs me a bit. I translate it in my head to the Portuguese "codificar" (I'm Brazilian), which is associated with negative notions: making things arcane and undecypherable. I like to think my code isn't arcane and undecypherable - unless specifically intended otherwise - so I prefer "programming", "hacking" or just "algorithm designing"
Programmers who enjoy coding so much that they'll do it for free like to use unix, and not Windows.
*ahem* Excuse me, but I think someone forgot to send me the invitation to your crowning ceremony. FYI, I am a programmer, and I enjoy "coding" so much that I do it for free (I design programming languages on my spare time). However, I do not like Unix. In fact, it's fair to say that I hate it. (Just to keep you from accusing me of being a mindless Microsoft drone in a while: I also hate Windows.) I also hate C, vi and a bunch of other things that Unix zealots seem to believe to be the be-all, end-all of software. (When Rob Pike's article bemoaned the current state of systems research, and a bunch of people claimed that systems research should be stopped, being useless given that the ultimate system already existed in the shape of Unix... that was when I truly realised the sad state of our little community.) I've seen better things - I've seen truly open systems, built without preconceptions and making all the power of the machine available to the user, such as Symbolics' historical Lisp Machine OS, Genera. Compared to it and others, Unix's continued prevailance can only be explained by the influence and domination of the "worse-is-better" mentality in the IT industry. I hope that goes away in due time.
Besides from all that, there's a big error in your argument. You see, Free Software is "free" as in speech; it doesn't mean that people don't get paid for programming. I myself work on Free Software for a living, as do many fellows at Red Hat, Conectiva, IBM, Apple and many other companies. These people write Free Software, but they do unto it as management tells them to. If or when their numbers and power in the GNU/Linux community exceed those of "lone hackers", it won't be the programmers' choice any more, but that of the consumers - the people who pay for the software to be written, one way or the other.
I've read some of her stuff, it's bland, vague prognisticating.
One day when you feel hyper-active, compare "Release 2.0" to our own Bill Gates' "Business @ the Speed of Thought". See if it rings a bell.
And people shell out triple digits to subscribe to this, and pay lots of money to go to her seminars.
Even worse - she's the Big Boss of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and thus effectively the Absolute Monarch of the Internet! Under Queen Dyson's rule, the state of the Internet worldwide has gone from already bad to downright catastrophic.
What happens if you feed that program disimilar styles of music, say Metalica, Portishead, and Beatovens 9th?
It fails to find any kind of meaningful consistency, the ATN's knowledge base becomes underpopulated, and the final product is utterly bland and devoid of content. (Wow, so that's how they compose new songs for Britney Spears records!)
By the way... Beatovens? That's a damned cool name for a band! I've got dibs on it!
Also, if I feed the same songs in again do I get the same song out the system a second time, or is it just the same song as the first time?
No, the generative part of the process is randomised, so you merely get a different song in the same style. Look at the example MIDIs in the EMI web pages; there are a handful of generated Nocturnes in there, IIRC, and they're all different.
Been there, done that. David Cope has devised a symbolic AI program in Lisp called Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI) , based on the linguistic technique of augmented transition networks (ATNs).
Basically, you feed the program a set of pieces in the same style (say, Beethoven sonatas or Bach cantatas or Chopin Nocturnes), it processes them, abstracts from them the defining characteristics of this style and then proceeds to recombine them to create a new piece which, while noticeably different from all the the originals, can often easily pass for one of them.
I take it you've never heard of David Cope's work. Cope is a rather well-known contemporary composer, as well as a great computer scientist in his field. He has devised a symbolic AI program in Lisp called Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI), based on the linguistic technique of augmented transition networks (ATNs).
Basically, you feed the program a set of pieces in the same style, it processes them, abstracts from them the defining characteristics of this style and then proceeds to recombine them to create a new piece which, while noticeably different from all the the originals, can often easily pass for one of them.
Sure, music has "soul"; it just so happens that this "soul" is mathematically representable. That doesn't make it any less important.
Uuuuuuuurgh. Stupid Slashdot and its lack of Unicode support. Where it says lim_n->oo_ Z_n_(c) * oo, it's not *, but a =/= character.
When he finished, he realized that the comments were much, much longer than the code they attempted to describe.
;) Seriously, even if I expand the above formula to its textual correspondent, it'd still be much shorter than it could be expressed in any algorithmic language, because these are languages for computation, not for mathematical abstraction.
;)
(Oddly enough, I just had a similar discussion in DALNet #perl. I'll be a good programmer, then, and practice code (example) reuse.)
I remember that post on PM too; I disprove it thus.
"This is left as an exercise to the reader": write a Perl module Math::MB, such that, after
use Math::MB;
tie($m, 'Math::MB');
$t contains the Mandelbrot set. The length of Math::MB must be strictly smaller than the following description of the Mandelbrot set:
Definition. Let Z_1_(c) = 1, Z_n_(c) = Z_n-1_(c)^2 + c; then M = { c e |C | lim_n->oo_ Z_n_(c) * oo }.
(_foo_ denotates a subscript; oo denotates infinity.)
(Thus it is proved that, however concise Perl may be, mathematics is even more so.
My point is that the same thing applies to poetry. It shouldn't be described in terms of the pure textual size of its written form, but in terms of the "size" of the symbolic structure that the reader gathers from reading it. Perl can represent, e.g., pattern-matching, array looping and I/O, concisely because that's all that a Perl program does; there's no additional level of significance to the "text" that is Perl code, so the issue is merely one of Perl syntax vs. English syntax. However, ideas that are easily expressed in a "real" language like English, to a human, such as the concept of limits, the concept of a set, and the concept of a logic variable, have no reasonable equivalent in Perl programming.
Thus, Perl may be beautiful, but it's no poetry.
Those who did seemed to assume that copyright didnt' apply at all, and stole Napsters logo just to make a profit.
Napster's logo is trademarked, not copyrighted. It's a whole different set of legislation. If somebody uses the Napster logo to make money, they are forced to throw their lawyers at it, lest trademark dilution take place and angry shareholders chase Hank Barry around armed with threatening-looking staplers and ballpoint pens.
It means that a given symbol (word or variable) may have different meanings depending on its position in the sentence or in the dialogue.
Well-put. Semantics is the issue, not syntax. As for your examples, well, being able to understand them fully and comply with them appropriately would require nothing short of real AI, but a lesser version is actually much more simple (although still complex) to create once we're assuming to be operating in a free-object environment and allow for some heuristics, both built-in and user-definable.
Examples in a theoretical language with Lispy syntax but declarational, constraint-based syntax and built-in simple non-determinism (like what Prolog provides):
Open my wedding photos.
(let (((s in Photo-sets) | (contains? (label s) "wedding")))
(display-photo (p in s)))
Spell-check the latest draft of my current novel.
(let* (((n in Novels) | (for-all (n' in Novels) (not (more-recent? (creation-date n') (creation-date n)))))
(D (Drafts n))
((d in D) | (for-all (d' in D) | (not (more-recent? (modification-date d') (modification-date d))))))
(spell-check d))
"When did I receive an e-mail from my publisher with 'foo' in the subject?"
(let (((n in Address-book) | (contains? (comments n) "publisher"))
((e in (/ Messages Received)) | (and (eq? (field e 'From) n) (contains (subject e) "foo")))
(date e))
(Written in Netscape's stupid little textarea box, so if I made any parenthesising mistakes, please let me know.)
Such a natural-language shell wouldn't have to reproduce the semantics of English (or whatever other language, whether natural or synthetic like Lojban), but only enough as deemed useful for expressing tasks to the computer. It would, in essence, still be a programming language, only with a syntax which is less arcane.
As for the "dynamic" part... well, let's take Perl as an example. Perl is nowhere near as expressive as natural language, and it definitely doesn't resemble any of those syntax-wise. But it's got a lot of shortcuts. For example, the word "it" is represented by the variable $_. Many built-in functions, when they receive no argument, will assume that $_ is to be manipulated. For example, $o = int; is equivalent to $o = int $_;. As an extreme case, print; is equivalent to print STDOUT $_;.
This kind of thing, only extrapolated a bit, and with some added heuristics and user interaction history management, will make a NL shell perfectly useable most of the time, without having to reproduce the semantics of natural languages in full.