<include "2007-07-31 HwoToDo>| adds “in-line” convenience | 2007-07-31 HwoToDo |
Hans, you may make APL programmers of us, yet!
I was teasing, but I am intrigued, and I think it’s cool. After I wrote my comment, I spent an hour looking through Wikipedia at APL articles, and looking around on the web. I like APL a lot, when it works. If I can fluently read and write the language, it works wonderfully. Because I don’t know it, I sometimes wonder, “But could I really program an X quickly? And what family of problems is it optimized for?”
Sometimes I have a hard time with functional languages, because I feel like I have to reconstruct a complex diagram of relationships sometimes, from a short linear expression.
I’ve been thinking and experimenting lately with circuit board based programming languages and object systems and SuperObjects? and connectors systems.
I think it’s an awesome idea to make a wiki with more powerful expressions– functions, links, transclusions, data exports, … I remember your programmable hypertext environment often, and tell people about what you showed me. It’d be fun to extend OddMuse to support these kinds of things.
What we want to do, I think, is figure out how we can modify the oddmuse scripts, or something. Perhaps we should ask AlexSchroeder for (the / a) password, so that we can login and rework things for CommunityWiki? Perhaps we should rehost it, or something, in a special sandboxed environment, so that it doesn’t mess with other stuff that may also be in the server environment? It’s en route towards CommunityProgrammableWiki.
I don’t know what an OpenConceptsEnterprisesCorporation? is, but I’d be glad to learn. It sounds right up my alley, because I like talking about ideas, and developing ideas, and making sure that ideas get implemented.
I see a connection between “Wiki:AgglutinativeLanguage” and what I called a "Visual:HookupLanguage". The agglutinative languages that are based in spoken words, or are typed out, work on a line. In contrast, circuit schematics are (I think) planar agglutinative languages that hookup both vertically and horizontally.
I think that they’re “agglutinative,” because you’ll often see modifiers, such as a “not” triangle, attached to the output of a chip. Or you’ll see a sum, “sum up those outputs from the chip,” and lines used to say “those outputs,” and make a new output from it.
When people use “tee” in UNIX, and other branching mechanisms, you often times have to construct in your head, “how does this spatially lay itself out on a plane?” If it’s complex, I pull out a piece of paper, and try to diagram it.