I just stumbled on a weblog about programming languages and their design, called Lambda the Ultimate. Similar to what I want to do here, although I want to focus more specifically on languages that bridge the gap in some interesting way between natural human languages and traditional computer languages.

Apocalypse 12 is out.

In case you live in a cave, the Apocalypses are Larry Wall's occasional manifestos (manifesti?) about how some aspect of Perl 6 will work. I read them with great interest because I like how Wall thinks, and I'm an avid user of Perl, and Perl 6 has some great ideas in it. I like hyperoperators and the new regular expression syntax. That being said, I'm getting kind of worried that Perl 6 is going to be too crufty. Look at what you can do with subroutine signatures. It seems unnecessarily complex and cryptic.

Of course I thought that back when I was learning Old Perl, but now I know it well and can use pretty efficiently, so I'll withhold judgment on Perl 6 until I get a chance to use it.

What this blog is about

The last post was mostly a test. What I want to do here is review computer languages that bridge the gap between computer language and human language in some interesting way.

Lojban is an attempt to make a human language somewhat more approachable by computers -- it has a yacc-parseable grammar that is syntactically unambiguous. In practice so far it has been used for communication between humans, not to specify or constrain a computer's behavior in any way. But it's a good example of an effort to think about some of the differences between the two kinds of language and find halfway points.

I do think that someday computers will be able to cope with human language. For programming I think we'll always need something a little more precise (like the language used in human legal contracts, maybe) to avoid some ambiguity.
But that day could be a ways off; why not meet the machine halfway for now? High-level languages have come a long way from raw machine code in doing this; I'm interested in seeing in what other ways computer languages can be more human without requiring outright artificial intelligence in the computer that uses them.