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> but being beginner-friendly is about the last thing one should care about. Why is that? If our ideas are good, don't we want the most number of people to kn

> but being beginner-friendly is about the last thing one should care about. Why is that? If our ideas are good, don't we want the most number of people to know them? What if PL research isn't getting the population of people and ideas it desires? Look to organizations that have been around longer with even more inscrutable forms of knowledge, how well do they age and evolve? I think there is a lot more at play here when it comes to optimizing for beginners. Imagine if we had metalanguages for conveying knowledge and that we could distill common subjects from 6 years -> 6 weeks -> 6 hours -> 6 minutes. Or tooling that allowed us to write in both the Simple English Wikpedia, the standard and at the expert level at the same time? Or refactored our writing so it was in the Inverted Pyramid [1], automatically generating tl;drs and keeping our long winded posts on track? Wouldn't that be amazing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)

beagle3 6y ago
> Wouldn't that be amazing. We know that there's a lower limit to distillation that cannot be breached, "Kolmogorov Complexity", which extends Shannon entropy significantly. Furthermore, though this limit is universal, it does (in a well defined way) depend on your prior knowledge. It may seem paradoxical but isn't - it's just too long for this space.... It is not proof in the mathematical sense, mostly because your statement cannot be qualified in such a sense, but it strongly hints that "it would be amazing" because it is impossible. Which is not to say we cannot do better than where we are today; but there is likely no solution that is, along all scenarios, better.
- seg_lol 6y ago
  You got me to chuckle at, "thought terminating thought experiment". I will file that in my cliché attaché. Are you saying that I am asking for a universal perfect compressor, like I am winning the Hutter Prize [1] ? I don't believe I said that. To add to the tooling, what if the forum itself "learned you", and took that into account when I respond. It would know everything you wrote, potentially everything you read (on this site), and you in turn would know me. It might help mediate a discussion or prevent folks from talking past each other. What if our systems, could allow us to contextualize communication so that it was grounded in the same basis of knowledge as the receiver? Might some of those signaling mechanisms be the norms and affectations of each branch of study? You have given me some things to think about [2] [1] http://prize.hutter1.net/ http://prize.hutter1.net/ [2] http://users.ics.aalto.fi/pkaski/kca/ http://users.ics.aalto.fi/pkaski/kca/ [3] Looks like they have some thought provoking books and interviews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Chaitin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Chaitin Is Mathematics Invented or Discovered? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RLdSvQ-OF0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RLdSvQ-OF0 [4] A physicist looks at linguistics through a complexity lens http://www.its.caltech.edu/~matilde/LinguisticsToronto7.pdf http://www.its.caltech.edu/~matilde/LinguisticsToronto7.pdf http://www.its.caltech.edu/~matilde/MOL2019MathLinguisticsSlides.pdf http://www.its.caltech.edu/~matilde/MOL2019MathLinguisticsSl...
  - beagle3 6y ago
    I'm not sure how I contributed to your cliche attache, but I'm happy to help :) (The quotes imply it's reference to my words - but I wonder which ones?) > Are you saying that I am asking for a universal perfect compressor, In many ways, I think you are, of the Kolmogorov/Chaitin kind, if you are talking about language (which I thought you were). If you are talking about tooling, that would expand the same text at different level to different readers, then -- I didn't understand that, and that wasn't my response; I'll have to ponder that for a while before I respond. I do think that algorithmic complexity is the right context to consider notation, if that wasn't clear -- not in that we can (or should) distill knowledge to the smallest representation, but in the implications of what different "interpretation machines" (that is, persons reading ...) need in order to understand a notation.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
> Why is that? If our ideas are good, don't we want the most number of people to know them? We want that. But notation is for working with and on ideas, not teaching them. You want a tool that maps well to the problem domain, that lets you efficiently operate difficult concepts by proxy of simple symbols, whose relationship maps closely to the rules governing the problem domain. The task of a beginner isn't to grasp a complex domain immediately (as that's impossible). Their task is to gradually ingest ideas (and increasingly complex notations) until they can operate at the level of the experienced, with the tools of the experienced. Demanding that a notation used for work is also easy for beginners is just handicapping the experienced, and making advanced work near-impossible. It would be like demanding that every excavator be no larger than 1.5 x 1.5 x 1.5 meters and be made entirely of colorful plastic, because that's what little kids can work with. The "barrier" that a notation creates isn't there to keep people from crossing it. Building ramps over that barrier is a good thing to do. But the barrier has a purpose - it's there to contain and control the forces of thought that are unleashed inside it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Kalium 6y ago
> Why is that? If our ideas are good, don't we want the most number of people to know them? Do you think the tools for broad communication and peer practitioner communication could be very different because they have different aims? Spreading findings in cutting-edge research as broadly as possible is perhaps in some cases not the primary goal. That is not to say we should in any way that we should gatekeep knowledge! That is unconscionable. It's just that perhaps Watson and Crick's paper on x-ray crystallography of DNA is perhaps not the ideal time to stop and explain what electromagnetism is so that a reader can understand what an x-ray is.
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
If you go into a bike shop, you see that the bikes for beginners are quite different from the bikes for experts, and especially those for professionals. I mean, even the riding posture is different. We want beginner languages to make it as easy as possible to learn programming, and to be able to write a program to do simple things. Our PL ideas may be good, but no, we don't want beginners to need to know them. We want them to be able to learn to program at all, and the fewer ideas they need to learn to do so, the better (that is, the more of them will learn). And then we want to encourage them to move on to more advanced ideas. To do that, we want to make the more advanced ideas as accessible as possible (which I think was your point). And to do that, we need to make ideas as orthogonal as possible; that is, we need to decouple them as much as possible. This lets someone learn as much as they want about one area without having to first learn all the other areas.

beagle3 6y ago

> Wouldn't that be amazing. We know that there's a lower limit to distillation that cannot be breached, "Kolmogorov Complexity", which extends Shannon entropy significantly. Furthermore, though this limit is universal, it does (in a well defined way) depend on your prior knowledge. It may seem paradoxical but isn't - it's just too long for this space.... It is not proof in the mathematical sense, mostly because your statement cannot be qualified in such a sense, but it strongly hints that "it would be amazing" because it is impossible. Which is not to say we cannot do better than where we are today; but there is likely no solution that is, along all scenarios, better.

seg_lol 6y ago
You got me to chuckle at, "thought terminating thought experiment". I will file that in my cliché attaché. Are you saying that I am asking for a universal perfect compressor, like I am winning the Hutter Prize [1] ? I don't believe I said that. To add to the tooling, what if the forum itself "learned you", and took that into account when I respond. It would know everything you wrote, potentially everything you read (on this site), and you in turn would know me. It might help mediate a discussion or prevent folks from talking past each other. What if our systems, could allow us to contextualize communication so that it was grounded in the same basis of knowledge as the receiver? Might some of those signaling mechanisms be the norms and affectations of each branch of study? You have given me some things to think about [2] [1] http://prize.hutter1.net/ http://prize.hutter1.net/ [2] http://users.ics.aalto.fi/pkaski/kca/ http://users.ics.aalto.fi/pkaski/kca/ [3] Looks like they have some thought provoking books and interviews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Chaitin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Chaitin Is Mathematics Invented or Discovered? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RLdSvQ-OF0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RLdSvQ-OF0 [4] A physicist looks at linguistics through a complexity lens http://www.its.caltech.edu/~matilde/LinguisticsToronto7.pdf http://www.its.caltech.edu/~matilde/LinguisticsToronto7.pdf http://www.its.caltech.edu/~matilde/MOL2019MathLinguisticsSlides.pdf http://www.its.caltech.edu/~matilde/MOL2019MathLinguisticsSl...
- beagle3 6y ago
  I'm not sure how I contributed to your cliche attache, but I'm happy to help :) (The quotes imply it's reference to my words - but I wonder which ones?) > Are you saying that I am asking for a universal perfect compressor, In many ways, I think you are, of the Kolmogorov/Chaitin kind, if you are talking about language (which I thought you were). If you are talking about tooling, that would expand the same text at different level to different readers, then -- I didn't understand that, and that wasn't my response; I'll have to ponder that for a while before I respond. I do think that algorithmic complexity is the right context to consider notation, if that wasn't clear -- not in that we can (or should) distill knowledge to the smallest representation, but in the implications of what different "interpretation machines" (that is, persons reading ...) need in order to understand a notation.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

> Why is that? If our ideas are good, don't we want the most number of people to know them? We want that. But notation is for working with and on ideas, not teaching them. You want a tool that maps well to the problem domain, that lets you efficiently operate difficult concepts by proxy of simple symbols, whose relationship maps closely to the rules governing the problem domain. The task of a beginner isn't to grasp a complex domain immediately (as that's impossible). Their task is to gradually ingest ideas (and increasingly complex notations) until they can operate at the level of the experienced, with the tools of the experienced. Demanding that a notation used for work is also easy for beginners is just handicapping the experienced, and making advanced work near-impossible. It would be like demanding that every excavator be no larger than 1.5 x 1.5 x 1.5 meters and be made entirely of colorful plastic, because that's what little kids can work with. The "barrier" that a notation creates isn't there to keep people from crossing it. Building ramps over that barrier is a good thing to do. But the barrier has a purpose - it's there to contain and control the forces of thought that are unleashed inside it.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Kalium 6y ago

> Why is that? If our ideas are good, don't we want the most number of people to know them? Do you think the tools for broad communication and peer practitioner communication could be very different because they have different aims? Spreading findings in cutting-edge research as broadly as possible is perhaps in some cases not the primary goal. That is not to say we should in any way that we should gatekeep knowledge! That is unconscionable. It's just that perhaps Watson and Crick's paper on x-ray crystallography of DNA is perhaps not the ideal time to stop and explain what electromagnetism is so that a reader can understand what an x-ray is.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago

If you go into a bike shop, you see that the bikes for beginners are quite different from the bikes for experts, and especially those for professionals. I mean, even the riding posture is different. We want beginner languages to make it as easy as possible to learn programming, and to be able to write a program to do simple things. Our PL ideas may be good, but no, we don't want beginners to need to know them. We want them to be able to learn to program at all, and the fewer ideas they need to learn to do so, the better (that is, the more of them will learn). And then we want to encourage them to move on to more advanced ideas. To do that, we want to make the more advanced ideas as accessible as possible (which I think was your point). And to do that, we need to make ideas as orthogonal as possible; that is, we need to decouple them as much as possible. This lets someone learn as much as they want about one area without having to first learn all the other areas.