A love of programming ... in lojban?
Shae Erisson
pointed out
Matt Hellige's axiom
"Programmers should love programming."
That reminded me of the last paragraph of
this entry of mine,
about the death of the UCLA Computer Club,
once Computer Science turned into vocational
training for future Pascal coders.
And yesterday,
Shae mentioned
" ... some excellent reasons for spoken programming languages."
That was one of the original goals
of loglan/Lojban -- to
be unambiguous enough to be a speakable programming language.
It aims to avoid ambiguity at the phoneme level, which should
make speech recognition easier; and at the grammar level, to make
it easy to parse; and at the vocabulary level.
In its potential role as a speakable
programming language, the lack of ambiguity is
a quite important feature.
However, in lojban's
role as a language intended for human-to-human
communication, I think that the lack of ambiguity
makes the language less useful:
sometimes we just need to be vague.
Maybe we're just tired, or we
actually don't have the precise information,
or we haven't done the introspection to know
what we actually think about something.
Maybe we're negotiating (say, what restaurant
to go to for dinner) and we don't want
to commit to anything precise.
Hopefully, lojban's vocabulary has improved by
now, to embrace vagueness as a feature.
10:38:30 PM
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