4 ms·

> Loglan actually predates most programming languages Indeed the Scientific American mention of Loglan was 1960 -- after the invention of Cobol, Fortran, and L

> Loglan actually predates most programming languages Indeed the Scientific American mention of Loglan was 1960 -- after the invention of Cobol, Fortran, and Lisp (and 50's crud like autocoder), but before most everything else. Probably most hear of it for the first time from its prominent mention in Heinlein's Hugo Award-winning "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", where it is the "language" used to program the strong AI that is a major character. I ran a Loglan study group in college, and later studied Lojban, before abandoning conlangs (when I discovered that the strong version of the Sapir Whorf hypothesis is misguided at best -- although conlangs can be interesting for other reasons). > Is there a benefit to Loglan or Lojban over Esperanto? I am no longer so sure that the case is any different for conlangs than for natural languages. If I ask if there's a benefit of French versus Mandarin, people will chime in with their personal favorites and rationalizations for why one is better than the other, but objectively they are both very fine languages for literature and poetry.

WorldMaker 11y ago
«I ran a Loglan study group in college, and later studied Lojban, before abandoning conlangs (when I discovered that the strong version of the Sapir Whorf hypothesis is misguided at best -- although conlangs can be interesting for other reasons).» Not to get into too much of a tangent, but the Weak Sapir-Whorf is still an interesting view of things, where if it is easier to speak about something it is easier to work with it. I think Programming Languages bear this out over and over again (Programming Languages are very much a Sapir-Whorf playground). We have the Church-Turing Theorem and know that any Turing Complete language should be able to write just about any program one can reason about, but the fascinating thing is that different languages do seem suited to different domains and we keep trying to optimize programming languages to reason about particular problems, and all of that is fascinating. It's something we do in the miniscule in natural languages too, with jargon and domain-specific vocabulary and context. I think domain-specific conlangs is an under-explored space, and maybe modern Programming Languages have some interesting input to provide...

WorldMaker 11y ago

«I ran a Loglan study group in college, and later studied Lojban, before abandoning conlangs (when I discovered that the strong version of the Sapir Whorf hypothesis is misguided at best -- although conlangs can be interesting for other reasons).» Not to get into too much of a tangent, but the Weak Sapir-Whorf is still an interesting view of things, where if it is easier to speak about something it is easier to work with it. I think Programming Languages bear this out over and over again (Programming Languages are very much a Sapir-Whorf playground). We have the Church-Turing Theorem and know that any Turing Complete language should be able to write just about any program one can reason about, but the fascinating thing is that different languages do seem suited to different domains and we keep trying to optimize programming languages to reason about particular problems, and all of that is fascinating. It's something we do in the miniscule in natural languages too, with jargon and domain-specific vocabulary and context. I think domain-specific conlangs is an under-explored space, and maybe modern Programming Languages have some interesting input to provide...