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This would put us in a situation where we would have lawyers comparing programming languages and assessing their novelty w.r.t. intellectual property violations

by exDM69 15y ago

This would put us in a situation where we would have lawyers comparing programming languages and assessing their novelty w.r.t. intellectual property violations. We do _not_ want to get into this situation. It might end up in a situation where two languages are similar on the inside but there's a minor change to make it incompatible but non-infringing. Not ideal. Many programming languages are very similar to each other and it's very hard to differentiate. Python, Perl, Lua and Ruby are very similar on the inside, despite their syntactic differences. If one of them was patented or copyrighted, it could hinder the others.

tomrod 15y ago
I agree with what you're saying. Does my point make sense? some clarification here: I'm saying copyright the entire item, which to me means the syntax. The implementation ought not to be patentable due to prior art. I mean, Lovelace, Church, Turing, Gauss and Euclid have never been paid royalties for building the foundation on which computing lies. Why should Oracle be thus complicated.
- exDM69 15y ago
  > I'm saying copyright the entire item, which to me means the syntax. A programming language is so much more than just the syntax. The syntax is only skin-deep, what matters (and where the differences are) is the semantics of the language. The problem in copyrighting the syntax of a language is that it's very trivial to whip up another syntax. For example, JavaScript has the regular syntax but you can also write JavaScript using the CoffeeScript or ParenScript syntax while having the same semantics. So if someone were to copyright a language syntax, it would be very easy to write an almost compatible language with a minor change to the syntax. The new language would be (source level) incompatible, but in essence it would be the same thing. The only reason for adding this incompatibility would be to avoid IP restrictions. That's what we don't want, similar but incompatible languages with the only motivation being keeping lawyers happy.

by exDM69 15y ago

tomrod 15y ago

I agree with what you're saying. Does my point make sense? some clarification here: I'm saying copyright the entire item, which to me means the syntax. The implementation ought not to be patentable due to prior art. I mean, Lovelace, Church, Turing, Gauss and Euclid have never been paid royalties for building the foundation on which computing lies. Why should Oracle be thus complicated.

exDM69 15y ago
> I'm saying copyright the entire item, which to me means the syntax. A programming language is so much more than just the syntax. The syntax is only skin-deep, what matters (and where the differences are) is the semantics of the language. The problem in copyrighting the syntax of a language is that it's very trivial to whip up another syntax. For example, JavaScript has the regular syntax but you can also write JavaScript using the CoffeeScript or ParenScript syntax while having the same semantics. So if someone were to copyright a language syntax, it would be very easy to write an almost compatible language with a minor change to the syntax. The new language would be (source level) incompatible, but in essence it would be the same thing. The only reason for adding this incompatibility would be to avoid IP restrictions. That's what we don't want, similar but incompatible languages with the only motivation being keeping lawyers happy.