4 ms·

One thing abundantly clear is that syntax matters. I feel this is like reading 100 years ago about how to make your own new type of horse & buggy, with tips li

One thing abundantly clear is that syntax matters. I feel this is like reading 100 years ago about how to make your own new type of horse & buggy, with tips like "make sure the reigns are well-fitted," when what you want to invent is a car. The future doesn't belong to syntax because the future isn't text. The same people that would blanch at sending a string argument of "ONE" or "TWO" are indifferent about the fact that they send in "IF" to start a condition. The reason you wouldn't send in "ONE" or "TWO" is because it makes it stiffer, more brittle and harder to manage. What can we say about the software we write? That it's stiff, brittle and hard to manage. It's not that the future has no textual syntax at all, of course. An expression of 3+4*5 will always be easiest to express just that way. But we need to pull back from our gregarious, wide-mouthed babbling into something more meta, or I should say, more data, than text.

bmm6o 11y ago
To be fair, Dr Dobbs' audience is working engineers, not PL researchers, and even researchers haven't had much success in non-text languages.
- david927 11y ago
  To be fair, if Dr. Dobbs doesn't have the audience for PLR, their article on "Write Your Own Language" should consist of two words: Please don't
pjc50 11y ago
Writing is approximately five thousand years old. Symbolic algebra is about a thousand. Text will be with us for our lifetimes.
commentzorro 11y ago
This is the ??? (I don't know what to describe it as) post here. You took the one sentence I just loved from the article and pooped on it. Then tried to tie it in with details of a non syntax related item and process. Next, you said a two character syntax for describing something as complex as an if statement was somehow too much burden?! Not sure what the future of programming languages is. But if humans are involved I suspect there will be a visual representation. And that means syntax. And that syntax will matter then just as it does now.
- david927 11y ago
  I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. This is my opinion; I didn't expect it to receive a warm reception. If you went to a horse and buggy convention 150 years ago and told them that it would all be gone soon, they would have virulent reaction, right? They would say that metal contraptions have been tried before and failed, that humans have been using horses for travel for thousands of years and if so if humans are involved, it will mean horses. This isn't to prove my point but to draw caution to yours. Note that I understand your position quite well but that you clearly don't remotely understand anything that I've written. That should raise a flag. Instead of getting mad, you should be getting curious.
  - commentzorro 11y ago
    Not mad ... not sad ... not misunderstanding. Just weirded out by the use of non sequiturs to crap on a thought you didn't like.
  - knz42 11y ago
    I am a PL researcher and I too believe you may not fully understand what's going on. To keep your analogy, the idea that a PL needs syntax to be used is comparable to the idea that a vehicle needs acceleration to get moving. Different flavors of syntax correspond to different means of propulsion. Perhaps we will find good way to get rid of context free grammars (the horses in your example) and replace them with automatic pruning of parse forests (the current Tesla car of compilers) or even something more fancy like semantic editors (a fusion engine in your example) but unless you change the laws of physics, you can't get a vehicle without an accelerating engine nor a PL without an input syntax.
Jtsummers 11y ago
Structure is syntax. Even if it's non-textual, say visual languages, there's still a structure and syntax to the language. What's your vision of a future, syntax-free, language?
- david927 11y ago
  I'm referring to the article, so I'm referring to what it means by syntax, which is "your decision to use curly braces is of utmost importance." I specifically added this statement to help clarify: "It's not that the future has no textual syntax at all, of course." The difference between a text file and a database is not that the database contains no text, but rather the relations between items is discretely managed. What I'm saying is this: storing a program as a text file was understandable in the 1970's but now is what a brain-damaged, drooling Bonobo might do. Would you store your payroll as text? Really? "Bob is too be paid eighty thousand a year;" (And I sure hope the compiler catches the misspelled 'too' or he might not get paid.) Structure is syntax No, structure is semantics represented by syntax. And that structure is all that counts, so we want to get there as discretely as possible. We want to get there as data. And when we do that, the syntax can be a decorator pattern; it can be what you want it to be and something else to someone else, all without modifying its core meaning. And what happens when it's just a decorator pattern? It loses its importance.
  - knz42 11y ago
    You're making a categorical error here. The entire discussion is not about storing programs but about entering them. If you want to use a database for storage then the UI you present to populate your database will become syntax. The idea that you can have multiple syntaxes for the same language is not new (eg multilingual pascal or basic) heck even different semantic models are possible (eg LLVM) but any UI that enables a programmer to tell a computer what to do is ultimately syntax.

bmm6o 11y ago

To be fair, Dr Dobbs' audience is working engineers, not PL researchers, and even researchers haven't had much success in non-text languages.

david927 11y ago
To be fair, if Dr. Dobbs doesn't have the audience for PLR, their article on "Write Your Own Language" should consist of two words: Please don't

pjc50 11y ago

Writing is approximately five thousand years old. Symbolic algebra is about a thousand. Text will be with us for our lifetimes.

commentzorro 11y ago

This is the ??? (I don't know what to describe it as) post here. You took the one sentence I just loved from the article and pooped on it. Then tried to tie it in with details of a non syntax related item and process. Next, you said a two character syntax for describing something as complex as an if statement was somehow too much burden?! Not sure what the future of programming languages is. But if humans are involved I suspect there will be a visual representation. And that means syntax. And that syntax will matter then just as it does now.

david927 11y ago
I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. This is my opinion; I didn't expect it to receive a warm reception. If you went to a horse and buggy convention 150 years ago and told them that it would all be gone soon, they would have virulent reaction, right? They would say that metal contraptions have been tried before and failed, that humans have been using horses for travel for thousands of years and if so if humans are involved, it will mean horses. This isn't to prove my point but to draw caution to yours. Note that I understand your position quite well but that you clearly don't remotely understand anything that I've written. That should raise a flag. Instead of getting mad, you should be getting curious.
- commentzorro 11y ago
  Not mad ... not sad ... not misunderstanding. Just weirded out by the use of non sequiturs to crap on a thought you didn't like.
- knz42 11y ago
  I am a PL researcher and I too believe you may not fully understand what's going on. To keep your analogy, the idea that a PL needs syntax to be used is comparable to the idea that a vehicle needs acceleration to get moving. Different flavors of syntax correspond to different means of propulsion. Perhaps we will find good way to get rid of context free grammars (the horses in your example) and replace them with automatic pruning of parse forests (the current Tesla car of compilers) or even something more fancy like semantic editors (a fusion engine in your example) but unless you change the laws of physics, you can't get a vehicle without an accelerating engine nor a PL without an input syntax.

Jtsummers 11y ago

Structure is syntax. Even if it's non-textual, say visual languages, there's still a structure and syntax to the language. What's your vision of a future, syntax-free, language?

david927 11y ago
I'm referring to the article, so I'm referring to what it means by syntax, which is "your decision to use curly braces is of utmost importance." I specifically added this statement to help clarify: "It's not that the future has no textual syntax at all, of course." The difference between a text file and a database is not that the database contains no text, but rather the relations between items is discretely managed. What I'm saying is this: storing a program as a text file was understandable in the 1970's but now is what a brain-damaged, drooling Bonobo might do. Would you store your payroll as text? Really? "Bob is too be paid eighty thousand a year;" (And I sure hope the compiler catches the misspelled 'too' or he might not get paid.) Structure is syntax No, structure is semantics represented by syntax. And that structure is all that counts, so we want to get there as discretely as possible. We want to get there as data. And when we do that, the syntax can be a decorator pattern; it can be what you want it to be and something else to someone else, all without modifying its core meaning. And what happens when it's just a decorator pattern? It loses its importance.
- knz42 11y ago
  You're making a categorical error here. The entire discussion is not about storing programs but about entering them. If you want to use a database for storage then the UI you present to populate your database will become syntax. The idea that you can have multiple syntaxes for the same language is not new (eg multilingual pascal or basic) heck even different semantic models are possible (eg LLVM) but any UI that enables a programmer to tell a computer what to do is ultimately syntax.