9 ms·

Cree#, a morphemic programming language with Cree keywords and concepts

86 points by relatt 6y ago

smitty1e 6y ago
> Jon Corbett Not to be confused with Jonathan Corbet of LWN.
api 6y ago
I can imagine another timeline where the settlement of the Americas was more a blending than a displacement and there exist things like Cherokee and Navajo keyboards.
- craigbaker 6y ago
  Both keyboards do exist. The Cherokee layout is included in OSX and iOS, while Navajo is available for download. You can find pictures of Cherokee keycaps in use, and I think there were also typewriters and certainly printed type in Cherokee.
  - sneak 6y ago
    None seem to be for sale on eBay or Amazon.
- philwelch 6y ago
  The cultural devastation wrought on the indigenous peoples of the Americas was tragic. But it was also largely inevitable. The colonization of Africa left many more Africans alive than the colonization of America because America was biologically isolated from Eurasia while Africa was not. The epidemics, particularly of smallpox, that depopulated the Americas were so brutal largely because the indigenous Americans had neither the biological nor the cultural adaptation to infectious disease that was common among Eurasians and Africans. Most indigenous causes of illness in the Americas were due to parasites rather than viruses and bacteria, allowing the evolution of cultural practices like having the entire extended family of a sick person keep them company and try and comfort them through their illness. One consequence of this is that the indigenous cultures that we’ve actually had the chance to study don’t really represent the pre-Colombian cultures that well, because by then, there was already substantial disruption from the infectious diseases and wildlife that spread throughout the continent well in advance of explorers and colonists.
  - AlotOfReading 6y ago
    This narrative gets trotted out anytime this subject comes up. It's not reflective of the actual literature. Here's an older perspective from 2009 [1]: > the available evidence clearly indicates that the demographic collapse was not uniform in either timing or magnitude and may have been caused by factors other than epidemic disease. ... Despite the trauma of conquest, Native Americans continued to have their own histories, intertwined with but not entirely determined by Europeans and their pathogens. Since that was written, the evidence has swung even more strongly towards the idea that disease was intimately associated with the close, persistent contacts needed for the "conquest" and missionary activities of colonial powers. Not to mention, similar epidemics were observed among indigenous southern africans and siberians during their respective colonizations. The Americas were unique in the scale and completeness of their disruption, but not in the mechanisms. [1] https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-009-9036-8 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-009-9036-8
    - jariel 6y ago
      This is a wayward argument. You're arguing from the quote that 'it's other than disease' and then two sentences later that it was, but due to 'persistent contact needed for conquest'. None of this adds up to a coherent argument. If Aboriginals weren't dying en mass from disease, then what from? Because we have crude records of interaction. There were very few violent fights between Aboriginals and newcomers in Canada, for example. And where is the evidence that Colonialists had 'consistent, closer contact' in hew New World, than in Africa? I'm all for more nuanced history, we're learning stuff every day, but I think a lot of it is also speculative, and ideologically driven.
      - Grieving 6y ago
        I agree largely with your response, but > And where is the evidence that Colonialists had 'consistent, closer contact' in hew New World, than in Africa? In Africa, Europeans died off rapidly due to local diseases. Consequently, the early slave trade was centered in the islands off of Africa itself, and mediated by a mulatto class who were less susceptible.
- jariel 6y ago
  Aboriginals had no writing system so there would be no keyboards. That should be a signal as to how 'far apart' colonialists and aboriginals were with respect to development of cultural institutions. The writing you see in this post is invented by a Canadian-English Methodist Priest in the mid 10th (Edit: 19th century obviously!) century for the benefit of the aboriginals. The system, in current terms is itself 'firmly colonialist' (I'm sure someone will cynically characterize it as a form of oppression). That said, it'd be cool to see Cree keyboards. In fact, making a 'Cree Keyboard' might have been a much more practical use of the authors time, and might have actually more materially affected young people's ability to learn Cree. Come to think of it, there really should be such keyboards available ...
  - quiescant_dodo 6y ago
    > Aboriginals had no writing system so there would be no keyboards. The Maya and Aztec had writing in the form of hieroglypics. The Inca had persistent communication via Quipu's rope knots. (I learned this from _Guns, Germs, and Steel_ which is a phenomenal book. I haven't done other research, though, so maybe the book isn't a good source.)
    - jcranmer 6y ago
      Charles Mann's 1492 is a better book than Guns, Germs, and Steel for anything pre-Columbian Americas. The Mayans had a complete, complex logosyllabic writing system. (I believe the syllabic components are more common than logographic components, but I'm not certain). Individual syllables (or logograms) could be combined into a single glyph block in a variety of ways. This writing system, I believe, is connected to Zapotec and epi-Olmec writing systems, but disentangling who created what and who borrowed from whom in Mesoamerica is challenging. The Aztecs had what appears to be a proto-writing system, largely capable of only recording proper nouns (predominantly place names); most of the writing would instead be conveyed pictographically. Before the Aztecs, in Classical Mesoamerica, Teotihuacan (which was the major power in the Central Mexico Valley at that time period) appears to have never used any form of writing, despite having conquered Classic Maya city-states which were in full florescence of their writing systems. Quipus originate at least as early as the Wari culture in the Andes, although (again) people only recognize the final Andean civilization, the Inca. Whether or not they are a writing system is debatable--it's known they encode more than just numeric values (such as place names), but whether they can convey enough information to be considered writing is unknown. Post-contact, Sequoya developed a syllabary for the Cherokee language based only on the knowledge of the existence of the Latin alphabet (he couldn't read English or any European language, but he did have access to European-language materials--that's why several Cherokee letterforms look like Latin ones but have completely different meanings). Missionaries in Canada developed a syllabary for several aboriginal languages that remains in use by many Cree, Ojibwe, and Inuktitut speakers.
- Grieving 6y ago
  That blending largely occurred in Latin America, but languages rarely survive such things both in the Americas and generally throughout history. Communication is important enough that the language of whichever group is technologically superior becomes the lingua franca, and the other slowly disappears.
  - samatman 6y ago
    That undersells the situation in Latin America, to put it mildly. There are almost two million native speakers of Nahuatl languages in Mexico, six million Maya speakers in Central America, 25% of Peru speaks Quechua at home (around ten million in total throughout the Andes). Guaraní has official status in Paraguay, half of the population is monolingual in it, substantial numbers of people of partial or complete European ancestry speak it every day, we're talking about 6.5 million people. As a point of comparison, there are 2.9 million registered Native Americans, and 5.2 million people who check that box, sometimes along with others, on the latest census.
    - jariel 6y ago
      You've basically proved the point of the commenter you are responding to. By your very own evidence - Spanish and Portuguese utterly dominate Central and South America. There are 650M people there, if ~10% of the population speaks another language, that helps prove the case of 'language from more advanced languages win'. Even where there is relative parity, systems definitely favour the language of the more powerful entity. All over Europe there are 'niche languages' dying out, which is sad, but it's materially the case. Go to Nice, France, and the street signs are in 'Nicoise' - not French. In Monaco if you listen carefully you can hear 'Monegasque'. The decline of those languages is hinted at in the fact my spellchecker doesn't even recognize those words, unfortunately.
    - Grieving 6y ago
      I'm not sure what you mean? You named a handful of languages that have survived, most of which are still in decline even if they still have substantial numbers of active speakers. The only one that seems possibly positioned to 'win out' in the long run is Guaraní, and even in Paraguay Spanish is steadily making inroads.
chickenmonkey 6y ago
I see this as an attempt to implement a programming paradigm (i.e storytelling) that's radically different from existing paradigms. How are others interpreting this project? What's it's significance?
saltyfamiliar 6y ago
This feels vaguely racist. It's one thing to make a programming language that uses Cree keywords, but to include smoke signals, call loops "winters" and make it all about "storytelling" just seems so patronizing.
- sterlind 6y ago
  The creator is Cree himself [0]. I think the storytelling aspect is what he's going for, not just to make C# but with Cree keywords. Baskets are weaved differently in different cultures. Is it possible to have a programming language that reflects a different culture or outlook? What would that look like? It's an experiment. 0. http://joncorbett.ca/default.html http://joncorbett.ca/default.html
- Mountain_Skies 6y ago
  Don't let past misuses of Cree culture by outsiders restrict their ability to use those paradigms as they see fit. Just because someone in Hollywood thought that smoke signals made a good trope for any movie involving first nations doesn't mean that smoke signals are inherently racist or offensive when used in an appropriate context.
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't take HN threads into flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
horsawlarway 6y ago
I read the whole interview, and at no point did I really feel like I understood what this is trying to achieve. The closest I felt I got was this: --- > Obviously my primary target communities here are Cree communities that are looking for new (and exciting) ways to encourage students (especially in the K-12 grades) to use their heritage language as much as possible, and resist using English as their primary language. --- But at the end of the day - This feels more like a display piece along the lines of art. Choices were personal, artistic, and spiritual. But I REALLY struggle to call this a programming language. To quote him: --- > Where the output is generative and graphic. The generative aspect is crucial in the representation of the Indigenous worldview, because when the program ends whatever display was generated is destroyed (comes to end of life). And subsequent running of the program – though they may produce similar results will never be graphically identical to any previous execution. This mimics the “real” world equivalent of listening to a story from a storyteller – who might change it slightly each time, so the same story is never the same twice. --- I'd say instead this feels more like NetLogo - It's a modeling environment that creates generative graphical output based on input, but is not capable of doing most of the things that I'd expect from any real programming language. Mainly - repeatability and precision. Doesn't make it a bad choice, particularly if his goal is student engagement - but it's not a tool that I feel has much use outside of the very limited environment of teaching/story telling.
- jdc 6y ago
  > Doesn't make it a bad choice, particularly if his goal is student engagement - but it's not a tool that I feel has much use outside of the very limited environment of teaching/story telling. And that's enough.
- ModernMech 6y ago
  I encourage you to watch this talk by Amy J. Ko called A Human View of Programming she gave at SPLASHCon a couple years ago [0]. It makes that case that the predominant view of programming languages as math or tools is not the only valid view, and that by holding this narrow definition for programming languages, the PL community has left a huge design space untapped. I think it's fine for you to expect repeatability and precision from the languages you use if you are using them as tools. But not everyone uses programming languages that way, so I don't think a PL that is not repeatable and precise is any less of a programming language. It may not be a good tool, but as the talk argues, that's okay, as this is only one a narrow view of programming languages. https://medium.com/bits-and-behavior/my-splash-2016-keynote-81cc802f5f6e https://medium.com/bits-and-behavior/my-splash-2016-keynote-...
Mountain_Skies 6y ago
That the keywords and symbols are Cree is trivial and not that much different than when someone does the same thing with Klingon or Swedish Chef but the concept of a programming language based on storytelling is interesting. It might never end up being a useful language for information infrastructure or corporate problem solving but I suspect that if it gains much traction with Cree students (or anyone with an interest) that they'll end up coming up with uses that we haven't thought of before with our programming languages tied so deeply to our cultural norms.
- na85 6y ago
  >with our programming languages tied so deeply to our cultural norms. In what way do you perceive mainstream programming languages to be tied to cultural norms?
  - enkid 6y ago
    They certainly are tied to a certain mode of thinking rooted in Mathematical reasoning originating in the West, but certainly influenced by other cultures. The thing is that the underlying computer architecture uses this reasoning, so it's difficult to see how you could program a computer without relying on that reasoning at some level.
    - x86ARMsRace 6y ago
      > Mathematical reasoning originating in the West Well, the form of mathematical reasoning that's prevalent was actually first developed during the Islamic Golden Age. Most of Western math is actually imported from the East. Symbolic logic, also is of Islamic origin.
    - drdeca 6y ago
      Mathematical reasoning doesn’t care who discovered it. If there is anything to the claim that it is “western”, it is in the way that “western” people regard it (possibly compared to how others regard it). I don’t see how the idea that mathematical reasoning is inherently “western” (as a property of mathematical thinking, as opposed to as a property of “western”) could possibly stand up to scrutiny. Sure, the symbols being used may be due to particular cultures, as well as a number of conventions (e.g. infix notation vs whatever, some minor choices made in some definitions, etc.), but, these are not inherent to mathematical reasoning.
temp0826 6y ago
Vaguely reminded of the lingua::Romana::Perligata module to write perl in latin http://users.monash.edu/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html http://users.monash.edu/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html
PostThisTooFast 6y ago
"CreePound?"
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
RangerScience 6y ago
This sounds both like it's absolutely incredible and has a long way to go. I recognize the creative approach of "I'm here, I want to go there, let's take one step at a time." It sounds like he's trying for a very comprehensive refactoring of the conceptual base of computing. No idea what'll come out of this, but I'm strongly rooting for it.
bradrn 6y ago
As someone with an interest in both linguistics and programming, I’ve often wondered what programming languages would be like if they had developed from an agglutinating language like Cree rather than the mostly isolating languages of western Europe. English sentences and phrases consist mostly of isolated words joined together by syntactic words: ‘Lie down on the table’. This has carried over to the programming languages we use, which mostly consist of isolated keywords and operators joined together by syntactic rules. e.g. a ‘translation’ of the previous example into Smalltalk-ish pseudocode would look something like: you lieDown; position: (table onTopOf) Contrast this to languages like Cree — or Ojibwe, since I can’t find a convenient Cree example — where this sentence becomes as follows, with the verb becoming the central element of the sentence and each word inflected describing its relationship to the others (Valentine 2001): Zhngishin doopwining. you lie prone on the table I’d be really curious to see how a native speaker of such a language would design a programming language — I’m not sure what it would look like, but I suspect it would look remarkably different to the ones we usually use. Corbett’s languages look like an interesting step in this direction, and I’d be interested in knowing more details if they’re available.
- tgv 6y ago
  I doubt it. Natural language agglutination tends to have all kinds of nasty side effects, modifying the letters at the boundary, which makes parsing hard and therefore would have created problems writing a decent parser in the early days. COBOL famously tried to follow English syntax, but most other languages deviate from it. Look at early languages such as RPG or SNOBOL. They follow the machine instruction set much more closely than the English grammar. But look at your smalltalk example: does that look like English syntax? First, the word order is wrong, and second, "onTopOf" already is a concatenation. It doesn't really support the idea that your native language shapes your programming.
  - bradrn 6y ago
    > Natural language agglutination tends to have all kinds of nasty side effects … Oh, sure; morphophonological processes do tend to mess up everything. (This is why Valentine doesn’t give a morpheme-by-morpheme gloss of the example I included.) This is why I don’t claim that such a programming language will be _exactly_ like human agglutination — only that it will have a very different structure to our languages. The complexities of human languages will always need to be simplified and regularised in order to create a programming language. > But look at your smalltalk example: does that look like English syntax? First, the word order is wrong, and second, "onTopOf" already is a concatenation. I agree that Smalltalk syntax doesn’t look at all like English syntax, at least in terms of word order. (If anything, it looks a lot more like Burmese.) And it is true that early languages like RPG and SNOBOL — and I should include assembly here as well — have little to do with any human language. But that’s not the central component of my claim. What’s important here is that, for most if not all modern programming languages, you can construct a syntax tree, like this: ┌────────┴─────────┐ │ ┌─────┴────┐ ┌──┴──┐ │ ┌──┴──┐ you lieDown; position: (table onTopOf) This is a very English-like trait, in that English sentences also consist of isolated words organised in a syntax tree: ┌───┴───┐ │ ┌──┴───┐ ┌──┴─┐ │ ┌──┴──┐ Lie down on the table This structure is of course common crosslinguistically, but agglutinative and polysynthetic languages such as Cree are structured differently. In these languages, words are composed of a stem, surrounded by affixes expressing their relationships to other words. e.g. Koasati verbs (which are reasonably straightforward in this regard) have the following structure (Kimball 1985): incorporated.noun - directional - instrumental - distributive - indirect.object - direct.object - specific.locative - general.locative - 1A.prefixes - STEM - adverb - diminutive - intention - ability - mood - deduction - modality - dubitative - hearsay - auditory - tense - consequence - sent.func = enclitics Due to this extensive marking, word order is extremely free; in many languages with this amount of marking, words within a sentence may be arranged in pretty much any order. Though linguists can still draw out syntax trees for these languages, it is unclear to what extent such an abstraction is useful: the affixes within a word have a rigid and non-hierarchical order, while the words themselves have few constraints on ordering. This is a characteristic unlike all programming languages I am aware of, and is what I refer to when I say that programming languages today are more like English and French than they are like Cree and Koasati.
int_19h 6y ago
> This mimics the “real” world equivalent of listening to a story from a storyteller – who might change it slightly each time, so the same story is never the same twice. What's the point of using a computer to do something that a human can do better? I thought the whole point of automation in general is to free people from the tedious stuff; but storytelling is not supposed to be tedious.

86 points by relatt 6y ago

> Jon Corbett Not to be confused with Jonathan Corbet of LWN.

api 6y ago

I can imagine another timeline where the settlement of the Americas was more a blending than a displacement and there exist things like Cherokee and Navajo keyboards.

craigbaker 6y ago
Both keyboards do exist. The Cherokee layout is included in OSX and iOS, while Navajo is available for download. You can find pictures of Cherokee keycaps in use, and I think there were also typewriters and certainly printed type in Cherokee.
- sneak 6y ago
  None seem to be for sale on eBay or Amazon.
philwelch 6y ago
The cultural devastation wrought on the indigenous peoples of the Americas was tragic. But it was also largely inevitable. The colonization of Africa left many more Africans alive than the colonization of America because America was biologically isolated from Eurasia while Africa was not. The epidemics, particularly of smallpox, that depopulated the Americas were so brutal largely because the indigenous Americans had neither the biological nor the cultural adaptation to infectious disease that was common among Eurasians and Africans. Most indigenous causes of illness in the Americas were due to parasites rather than viruses and bacteria, allowing the evolution of cultural practices like having the entire extended family of a sick person keep them company and try and comfort them through their illness. One consequence of this is that the indigenous cultures that we’ve actually had the chance to study don’t really represent the pre-Colombian cultures that well, because by then, there was already substantial disruption from the infectious diseases and wildlife that spread throughout the continent well in advance of explorers and colonists.
- AlotOfReading 6y ago
  This narrative gets trotted out anytime this subject comes up. It's not reflective of the actual literature. Here's an older perspective from 2009 [1]: > the available evidence clearly indicates that the demographic collapse was not uniform in either timing or magnitude and may have been caused by factors other than epidemic disease. ... Despite the trauma of conquest, Native Americans continued to have their own histories, intertwined with but not entirely determined by Europeans and their pathogens. Since that was written, the evidence has swung even more strongly towards the idea that disease was intimately associated with the close, persistent contacts needed for the "conquest" and missionary activities of colonial powers. Not to mention, similar epidemics were observed among indigenous southern africans and siberians during their respective colonizations. The Americas were unique in the scale and completeness of their disruption, but not in the mechanisms. [1] https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-009-9036-8 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-009-9036-8
  - jariel 6y ago
    This is a wayward argument. You're arguing from the quote that 'it's other than disease' and then two sentences later that it was, but due to 'persistent contact needed for conquest'. None of this adds up to a coherent argument. If Aboriginals weren't dying en mass from disease, then what from? Because we have crude records of interaction. There were very few violent fights between Aboriginals and newcomers in Canada, for example. And where is the evidence that Colonialists had 'consistent, closer contact' in hew New World, than in Africa? I'm all for more nuanced history, we're learning stuff every day, but I think a lot of it is also speculative, and ideologically driven.
    - Grieving 6y ago
      I agree largely with your response, but > And where is the evidence that Colonialists had 'consistent, closer contact' in hew New World, than in Africa? In Africa, Europeans died off rapidly due to local diseases. Consequently, the early slave trade was centered in the islands off of Africa itself, and mediated by a mulatto class who were less susceptible.
jariel 6y ago
Aboriginals had no writing system so there would be no keyboards. That should be a signal as to how 'far apart' colonialists and aboriginals were with respect to development of cultural institutions. The writing you see in this post is invented by a Canadian-English Methodist Priest in the mid 10th (Edit: 19th century obviously!) century for the benefit of the aboriginals. The system, in current terms is itself 'firmly colonialist' (I'm sure someone will cynically characterize it as a form of oppression). That said, it'd be cool to see Cree keyboards. In fact, making a 'Cree Keyboard' might have been a much more practical use of the authors time, and might have actually more materially affected young people's ability to learn Cree. Come to think of it, there really should be such keyboards available ...
- quiescant_dodo 6y ago
  > Aboriginals had no writing system so there would be no keyboards. The Maya and Aztec had writing in the form of hieroglypics. The Inca had persistent communication via Quipu's rope knots. (I learned this from _Guns, Germs, and Steel_ which is a phenomenal book. I haven't done other research, though, so maybe the book isn't a good source.)
  - jcranmer 6y ago
    Charles Mann's 1492 is a better book than Guns, Germs, and Steel for anything pre-Columbian Americas. The Mayans had a complete, complex logosyllabic writing system. (I believe the syllabic components are more common than logographic components, but I'm not certain). Individual syllables (or logograms) could be combined into a single glyph block in a variety of ways. This writing system, I believe, is connected to Zapotec and epi-Olmec writing systems, but disentangling who created what and who borrowed from whom in Mesoamerica is challenging. The Aztecs had what appears to be a proto-writing system, largely capable of only recording proper nouns (predominantly place names); most of the writing would instead be conveyed pictographically. Before the Aztecs, in Classical Mesoamerica, Teotihuacan (which was the major power in the Central Mexico Valley at that time period) appears to have never used any form of writing, despite having conquered Classic Maya city-states which were in full florescence of their writing systems. Quipus originate at least as early as the Wari culture in the Andes, although (again) people only recognize the final Andean civilization, the Inca. Whether or not they are a writing system is debatable--it's known they encode more than just numeric values (such as place names), but whether they can convey enough information to be considered writing is unknown. Post-contact, Sequoya developed a syllabary for the Cherokee language based only on the knowledge of the existence of the Latin alphabet (he couldn't read English or any European language, but he did have access to European-language materials--that's why several Cherokee letterforms look like Latin ones but have completely different meanings). Missionaries in Canada developed a syllabary for several aboriginal languages that remains in use by many Cree, Ojibwe, and Inuktitut speakers.
Grieving 6y ago
That blending largely occurred in Latin America, but languages rarely survive such things both in the Americas and generally throughout history. Communication is important enough that the language of whichever group is technologically superior becomes the lingua franca, and the other slowly disappears.
- samatman 6y ago
  That undersells the situation in Latin America, to put it mildly. There are almost two million native speakers of Nahuatl languages in Mexico, six million Maya speakers in Central America, 25% of Peru speaks Quechua at home (around ten million in total throughout the Andes). Guaraní has official status in Paraguay, half of the population is monolingual in it, substantial numbers of people of partial or complete European ancestry speak it every day, we're talking about 6.5 million people. As a point of comparison, there are 2.9 million registered Native Americans, and 5.2 million people who check that box, sometimes along with others, on the latest census.
  - jariel 6y ago
    You've basically proved the point of the commenter you are responding to. By your very own evidence - Spanish and Portuguese utterly dominate Central and South America. There are 650M people there, if ~10% of the population speaks another language, that helps prove the case of 'language from more advanced languages win'. Even where there is relative parity, systems definitely favour the language of the more powerful entity. All over Europe there are 'niche languages' dying out, which is sad, but it's materially the case. Go to Nice, France, and the street signs are in 'Nicoise' - not French. In Monaco if you listen carefully you can hear 'Monegasque'. The decline of those languages is hinted at in the fact my spellchecker doesn't even recognize those words, unfortunately.
  - Grieving 6y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean? You named a handful of languages that have survived, most of which are still in decline even if they still have substantial numbers of active speakers. The only one that seems possibly positioned to 'win out' in the long run is Guaraní, and even in Paraguay Spanish is steadily making inroads.

chickenmonkey 6y ago

I see this as an attempt to implement a programming paradigm (i.e storytelling) that's radically different from existing paradigms. How are others interpreting this project? What's it's significance?

saltyfamiliar 6y ago

This feels vaguely racist. It's one thing to make a programming language that uses Cree keywords, but to include smoke signals, call loops "winters" and make it all about "storytelling" just seems so patronizing.

sterlind 6y ago
The creator is Cree himself [0]. I think the storytelling aspect is what he's going for, not just to make C# but with Cree keywords. Baskets are weaved differently in different cultures. Is it possible to have a programming language that reflects a different culture or outlook? What would that look like? It's an experiment. 0. http://joncorbett.ca/default.html http://joncorbett.ca/default.html
Mountain_Skies 6y ago
Don't let past misuses of Cree culture by outsiders restrict their ability to use those paradigms as they see fit. Just because someone in Hollywood thought that smoke signals made a good trope for any movie involving first nations doesn't mean that smoke signals are inherently racist or offensive when used in an appropriate context.
dang 6y ago
Please don't take HN threads into flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

horsawlarway 6y ago

I read the whole interview, and at no point did I really feel like I understood what this is trying to achieve. The closest I felt I got was this: --- > Obviously my primary target communities here are Cree communities that are looking for new (and exciting) ways to encourage students (especially in the K-12 grades) to use their heritage language as much as possible, and resist using English as their primary language. --- But at the end of the day - This feels more like a display piece along the lines of art. Choices were personal, artistic, and spiritual. But I REALLY struggle to call this a programming language. To quote him: --- > Where the output is generative and graphic. The generative aspect is crucial in the representation of the Indigenous worldview, because when the program ends whatever display was generated is destroyed (comes to end of life). And subsequent running of the program – though they may produce similar results will never be graphically identical to any previous execution. This mimics the “real” world equivalent of listening to a story from a storyteller – who might change it slightly each time, so the same story is never the same twice. --- I'd say instead this feels more like NetLogo - It's a modeling environment that creates generative graphical output based on input, but is not capable of doing most of the things that I'd expect from any real programming language. Mainly - repeatability and precision. Doesn't make it a bad choice, particularly if his goal is student engagement - but it's not a tool that I feel has much use outside of the very limited environment of teaching/story telling.

jdc 6y ago
> Doesn't make it a bad choice, particularly if his goal is student engagement - but it's not a tool that I feel has much use outside of the very limited environment of teaching/story telling. And that's enough.
ModernMech 6y ago
I encourage you to watch this talk by Amy J. Ko called A Human View of Programming she gave at SPLASHCon a couple years ago [0]. It makes that case that the predominant view of programming languages as math or tools is not the only valid view, and that by holding this narrow definition for programming languages, the PL community has left a huge design space untapped. I think it's fine for you to expect repeatability and precision from the languages you use if you are using them as tools. But not everyone uses programming languages that way, so I don't think a PL that is not repeatable and precise is any less of a programming language. It may not be a good tool, but as the talk argues, that's okay, as this is only one a narrow view of programming languages. https://medium.com/bits-and-behavior/my-splash-2016-keynote-81cc802f5f6e https://medium.com/bits-and-behavior/my-splash-2016-keynote-...

Mountain_Skies 6y ago

That the keywords and symbols are Cree is trivial and not that much different than when someone does the same thing with Klingon or Swedish Chef but the concept of a programming language based on storytelling is interesting. It might never end up being a useful language for information infrastructure or corporate problem solving but I suspect that if it gains much traction with Cree students (or anyone with an interest) that they'll end up coming up with uses that we haven't thought of before with our programming languages tied so deeply to our cultural norms.

na85 6y ago
>with our programming languages tied so deeply to our cultural norms. In what way do you perceive mainstream programming languages to be tied to cultural norms?
- enkid 6y ago
  They certainly are tied to a certain mode of thinking rooted in Mathematical reasoning originating in the West, but certainly influenced by other cultures. The thing is that the underlying computer architecture uses this reasoning, so it's difficult to see how you could program a computer without relying on that reasoning at some level.
  - x86ARMsRace 6y ago
    > Mathematical reasoning originating in the West Well, the form of mathematical reasoning that's prevalent was actually first developed during the Islamic Golden Age. Most of Western math is actually imported from the East. Symbolic logic, also is of Islamic origin.
  - drdeca 6y ago
    Mathematical reasoning doesn’t care who discovered it. If there is anything to the claim that it is “western”, it is in the way that “western” people regard it (possibly compared to how others regard it). I don’t see how the idea that mathematical reasoning is inherently “western” (as a property of mathematical thinking, as opposed to as a property of “western”) could possibly stand up to scrutiny. Sure, the symbols being used may be due to particular cultures, as well as a number of conventions (e.g. infix notation vs whatever, some minor choices made in some definitions, etc.), but, these are not inherent to mathematical reasoning.

temp0826 6y ago

Vaguely reminded of the lingua::Romana::Perligata module to write perl in latin http://users.monash.edu/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html http://users.monash.edu/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html

PostThisTooFast 6y ago

"CreePound?"

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

RangerScience 6y ago

This sounds both like it's absolutely incredible and has a long way to go. I recognize the creative approach of "I'm here, I want to go there, let's take one step at a time." It sounds like he's trying for a very comprehensive refactoring of the conceptual base of computing. No idea what'll come out of this, but I'm strongly rooting for it.

bradrn 6y ago

As someone with an interest in both linguistics and programming, I’ve often wondered what programming languages would be like if they had developed from an agglutinating language like Cree rather than the mostly isolating languages of western Europe. English sentences and phrases consist mostly of isolated words joined together by syntactic words: ‘Lie down on the table’. This has carried over to the programming languages we use, which mostly consist of isolated keywords and operators joined together by syntactic rules. e.g. a ‘translation’ of the previous example into Smalltalk-ish pseudocode would look something like: you lieDown; position: (table onTopOf) Contrast this to languages like Cree — or Ojibwe, since I can’t find a convenient Cree example — where this sentence becomes as follows, with the verb becoming the central element of the sentence and each word inflected describing its relationship to the others (Valentine 2001): Zhngishin doopwining. you lie prone on the table I’d be really curious to see how a native speaker of such a language would design a programming language — I’m not sure what it would look like, but I suspect it would look remarkably different to the ones we usually use. Corbett’s languages look like an interesting step in this direction, and I’d be interested in knowing more details if they’re available.

tgv 6y ago
I doubt it. Natural language agglutination tends to have all kinds of nasty side effects, modifying the letters at the boundary, which makes parsing hard and therefore would have created problems writing a decent parser in the early days. COBOL famously tried to follow English syntax, but most other languages deviate from it. Look at early languages such as RPG or SNOBOL. They follow the machine instruction set much more closely than the English grammar. But look at your smalltalk example: does that look like English syntax? First, the word order is wrong, and second, "onTopOf" already is a concatenation. It doesn't really support the idea that your native language shapes your programming.
- bradrn 6y ago
  > Natural language agglutination tends to have all kinds of nasty side effects … Oh, sure; morphophonological processes do tend to mess up everything. (This is why Valentine doesn’t give a morpheme-by-morpheme gloss of the example I included.) This is why I don’t claim that such a programming language will be _exactly_ like human agglutination — only that it will have a very different structure to our languages. The complexities of human languages will always need to be simplified and regularised in order to create a programming language. > But look at your smalltalk example: does that look like English syntax? First, the word order is wrong, and second, "onTopOf" already is a concatenation. I agree that Smalltalk syntax doesn’t look at all like English syntax, at least in terms of word order. (If anything, it looks a lot more like Burmese.) And it is true that early languages like RPG and SNOBOL — and I should include assembly here as well — have little to do with any human language. But that’s not the central component of my claim. What’s important here is that, for most if not all modern programming languages, you can construct a syntax tree, like this: ┌────────┴─────────┐ │ ┌─────┴────┐ ┌──┴──┐ │ ┌──┴──┐ you lieDown; position: (table onTopOf) This is a very English-like trait, in that English sentences also consist of isolated words organised in a syntax tree: ┌───┴───┐ │ ┌──┴───┐ ┌──┴─┐ │ ┌──┴──┐ Lie down on the table This structure is of course common crosslinguistically, but agglutinative and polysynthetic languages such as Cree are structured differently. In these languages, words are composed of a stem, surrounded by affixes expressing their relationships to other words. e.g. Koasati verbs (which are reasonably straightforward in this regard) have the following structure (Kimball 1985): incorporated.noun - directional - instrumental - distributive - indirect.object - direct.object - specific.locative - general.locative - 1A.prefixes - STEM - adverb - diminutive - intention - ability - mood - deduction - modality - dubitative - hearsay - auditory - tense - consequence - sent.func = enclitics Due to this extensive marking, word order is extremely free; in many languages with this amount of marking, words within a sentence may be arranged in pretty much any order. Though linguists can still draw out syntax trees for these languages, it is unclear to what extent such an abstraction is useful: the affixes within a word have a rigid and non-hierarchical order, while the words themselves have few constraints on ordering. This is a characteristic unlike all programming languages I am aware of, and is what I refer to when I say that programming languages today are more like English and French than they are like Cree and Koasati.

int_19h 6y ago

> This mimics the “real” world equivalent of listening to a story from a storyteller – who might change it slightly each time, so the same story is never the same twice. What's the point of using a computer to do something that a human can do better? I thought the whole point of automation in general is to free people from the tedious stuff; but storytelling is not supposed to be tedious.