Hi.
It's a very small step from Lojban to a programming language, and in
fact Luke Kaiser and I have talked about making a programming language
syntax based on Lojban, using his Speagram program interpreter
framework.
The nice thing about Lojban is that it does have the flexibility to be
used as a pragmatic programming language (tho no one has done this yet),
**or** to be used to describe everyday situations in the manner
of a natural language....
Yes, in my opinion this **OR** should really be underlined. And I think
this is a very big problem -- you can talk about programming *or* talk
in everyday manner, but hardly both at the same time.
I could recently feel the pain as a friend of mine worked on using
Speagram in Wengo (an open source VoIP client) for language
control of different commands and actions. The problem is that, even
if you manage to get through parsing, context, disambiguation, add
some meaningful interaction etc., you end up with a set of commands
that is very hard to extend for non-programmer. So basically you can
activate a few pre-programmed commands in a quite-natural language
*and* you can add new commands in a naturally looking programming
language. But, even though this is internally the same language, there
is no way to say that you can program in a way that feels natural.
It seems to be like this: when you start programming, even though the
syntax is still natural, the language gets really awkward and does not
resemble the way you would express the same thing naturally. For me it
just shows that the real problem is somewhere deeper, in the semantic
representation that is underlying it all. Simply the first-order logic or
usual programming styles are different from everyday communication.
Switching to Lojban might remove the remaining syntax errors, but
I don't see how it can help with this bigger problem. Ben, do you think
using Lojban can really substantially help or are you counting on Agi-Sim
world and Novamente architecture in general, and want to use Lojban
just to simplify language analysis?
- lk
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