I was interested in hearing what using Arabic as a scripting language might do to change how code might be written -- not just a translation of words, but are there features of a language that are distinct from English that it would actually change our assumptions about a scripting language?
The video mentioned how the ligatures of Arabic can stretch, to allow fixed-width justification, which was neat, although it doesn't actually change our notions of scripting.
Consider, for instance, if English didn't have any imperative form, and instead everything were a request. Would declarative languages like Prolog have been the default?
Perhaps the most interesting thought experiments along this vein could be for conlangs. Can we write a conlang that is more elegant, meaningful, even beautiful for scripting?
Here's an quote from a New Yorker article on conlangs:
> Ithkuil has two seemingly incompatible ambitions: to be maximally precise but also maximally concise, capable of capturing nearly every thought that a human being could have while doing so in as few sounds as possible. Ideas that could be expressed only as a clunky circumlocution in English can be collapsed into a single word in Ithkuil. A sentence like “On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point” becomes simply “Tram-mļöi hhâsmařpţuktôx.”
>Consider, for instance, if English didn't have any imperative form, and instead everything were a request. Would declarative languages like Prolog have been the default?
You realize that this is the foundation of classic OOP, right?
Alan Kay:
"The big idea is "messaging" -- that is what the kernal of Smalltalk/Squeak
is all about (and it's something that was never quite completed in our
Xerox PARC phase). The Japanese have a small word -- ma -- for "that which
is in between" -- perhaps the nearest English equivalent is "interstitial".
The key in making great and growable systems is much more to design how its
modules communicate rather than what their internal properties and
behaviors should be."
> if English didn't have any imperative form, and instead everything were a request
INTERCAL statements all start with a "statement identifier"; in INTERCAL-72, this can be DO, PLEASE, or PLEASE DO, all of which mean the same to the program, but using one of these too heavily causes the program to be rejected
While originally created for a very different purpose, I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan and other logical languages would be a great basis for computer code.
The video mentioned how the ligatures of Arabic can stretch, to allow fixed-width justification, which was neat, although it doesn't actually change our notions of scripting.
Consider, for instance, if English didn't have any imperative form, and instead everything were a request. Would declarative languages like Prolog have been the default?
Perhaps the most interesting thought experiments along this vein could be for conlangs. Can we write a conlang that is more elegant, meaningful, even beautiful for scripting?
Here's an quote from a New Yorker article on conlangs:
> Ithkuil has two seemingly incompatible ambitions: to be maximally precise but also maximally concise, capable of capturing nearly every thought that a human being could have while doing so in as few sounds as possible. Ideas that could be expressed only as a clunky circumlocution in English can be collapsed into a single word in Ithkuil. A sentence like “On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point” becomes simply “Tram-mļöi hhâsmařpţuktôx.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-be...