Gregory's Server@david_chisnall
There is a recent game called Chants of Senaar that explores this "use-based language": a city where each caste (priests, soldiers, artists, scientists) have their own language that you need to learn, each language fit for expressing different concepts that were alien to other caste.
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@david_chisnall @baltauger I've considered this. The answer, really, is that a programming language is just a technology for a mind to use to alter the state of a machine, and not a subjective reality. Once the instructions are in the machine they dictate its operation. A human can try to imagine how the machine will operate under constraints but not be required to limit their own reality (if that were even possible) to that of the machine. Programming languages are SECOND languages, though. Your ability to program and what you can imagine doing with programming is constrained by your first language, your birth language, as much as by the supposed limitations of any programming language. Thing is, programming 'languages' aren't languages at all. The use of that word is a metaphor that doesn't work when moving to academic study of actual communication. This is deeply uninteresting to the linguist.  @caffetiel @david_chisnall @baltauger Huh, really? Are you using the word "language" to stand in for "natural language"? Or is there some broader definition of "language" that excludes programming languages? @naught101 @david_chisnall @baltauger Conlangs are still at least theoretically useful as languages? Hamlet was translated into Klingon, people write poetry in Valyrian, Na'vi of all things is used, and conferences are held in Esperanto. You can't do that with Assembly or C# or whatever else. It's just a metaphor to extend the word's use to them. @david_chisnall @baltauger To my knowledge, all modern programming languages are Turing Complete, which is to that every one of them can express any idea. After all, Guy Steele built an entire text editor in a functional language! |
@baltauger In linguistics, the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, also known as the Linguistic Relativity hypothesis, argues that language constrains thought. This was the idea behind Orwell's Newspeak. The strong variant argues that you cannot think an idea that your language cannot express (the goal of Newspeak), the weak variant argues that language guides thought. The strong variant is largely discredited because it turns out that humans are really good at just making up new language for new concepts. The weak variant is supported to varying degrees.
I keep trying to persuade linguists to study it in the context of programming languages, where humans are limited in the things that they can extend because a compiler / interpreter also needs to understand the language. I think there are some very interesting research results to be found there.
@baltauger In linguistics, the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, also known as the Linguistic Relativity hypothesis, argues that language constrains thought. This was the idea behind Orwell's Newspeak. The strong variant argues that you cannot think an idea that your language cannot express (the goal of Newspeak), the weak variant argues that language guides thought. The strong variant is largely discredited because it turns out that humans are really good at just making up new language for new concepts. The...