I'm not entirely sure why the idea of pattern expressions and meta-translators wasn't an awesome idea.
If expressing an idea cleanly in a language is possible, and expressing that language in another language clearly and cleanly is possible, why is it not possible to write a tool which will re-express that original idea in the second language, or any other target language for that matter? I thought this development of a meta-translator was not only one of the FUNC goals, but one that had for the most part been at least completed? Julian. On 11/10/2010, at 1:38 AM, Paul D. Fernhout wrote: > Anyway, so I do have hope that we may be able to develop platforms that let > us work at a higher level of abstraction like for programming or semantic web > knowledge representation, but we should still accept that (de facto social) > standards like JavaScript and so on have a role to play in all that, and we > need to craft our tools and abstractions with such things in mind (even if we > might in some cases just use them as a VM until we have something better). > That has always been the power of, say, the Lisp paradigm, even as > Smalltalk's message passing paradigm has a lot going for it as a unifying and > probably more scalable abstraction. What can be frustrating is when our > "bosses" say "write in Fortran" instead of saying "write on top of Fortran", > same as if they said, "Write in assembler" instead of "Write on top of > assembler or JavaScript or whatever". I think work like VPRI through COLA is > doing to think about getting the best of both worlds there is a wonderful > aspiration, kind of like trying to understand the particle/wave duality > mystery in physics (which it turns out is potentially explainable by a > many-worlds hypothesis, btw). But it might help to have better tools to do > that -- and tools that linked somehow with the semantic web and social > computing and so on. _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
