[e-lang] Levine the Genius Language Designer

[Norman Hardy]

Very good indeed. I strive for concise expressions of an algorithm  
and especially the notations in which those can be expressed.
In my mathematical mode I assume that we should all learn to make  
such notations familiar to us.
That is a fallacy; for some, and perhaps most of us the cost/benefit  
of such learning is negative for most of these many notations.
I believe in specialization; at least for language exploration and  
probably production we need specialists that learn new language  
paradigms deeply.
We also need literature that informs others of the benefits of these  
notions so as to guide us in what to learn.
We need to improve the art of describing such notions; tutorials are  
good but not enough.

To me, functional programming is natural.
To others, my code appears opaque and obfuscated.
Languages and libraries that rely on sub-classing are generally  
opaque to me.
I can decode their semantics sometimes, but it is like a dyslexic  
decoding a long English sentence.
To understand the meaning of such a program I must imagine how it runs.
Functional expressions with lambda are meaningful to me without such  
imagining.
Early versions of Cobol (before the first delivered compiler) boasted  
of the improved readability of the language because they had  
eliminated algebraic expressions from the language. One wrote instead  
"subtract tax from salary." which was supposed to improve readability.

On 2007 May 23, at 7:45 AM, Mark S. Miller wrote:

> Following a link on the squeak-dev list, I just came across the  
> tale of
>
> Levine the Genius Language Designer
> by Gerald Weinberg
> http://www.zafar.se/bkz/Articles/GeniusLanguageDesigner
>
> Quick, funny, and insightful.
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