🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1efg1gINNm6c@network.ucsd.edu> mbk@lyapunov.ucsd.edu (Matt Kennel) writes:

   : Feel free to design a computer language for mathematics.  Don't pretend
   : that other computer languages (least of all C) exist to serve you.

   Well, when he expresses some notion of what he wants to do, without specifying
   it the way computer scientists want to hear, he gets the third degree.  The
   point is that the computer scientists have the abilities and facilities to
   do what he wants (that he probably doesn't), but too many seem profoundly 
   unsympathetic to even his most basic motivations and they go tell him to jerk
   off.

Software companies will produce programming languages that the market
wants. Computer scientists will produce programming languages
incorporating features that they think the market will want 10 or 20
years from now. Rubin's ideal language isn't being produced partly
because he is asking for conflicting constraints to be satisfied, and
partly because people like him have evidently failed to convince
others that the features they want are useful and cost-effective.

   As an example, consider a Connection Machine---it's hardware is so fundamentally
   different, and so to even have a chance of writing intelligent programs, it's
   essential to be able to express these fundamentally new methods in software.
   (And yes, they do it.)  Herman's point is that more computers than you think
   may need this, especially as supercomputer-research-type stuff starts coming
   down to earth.  We don't want 87 completely different dialects of C, or tricky
   obscure code that compiles into something simple. We accept the necessity
   of hardware dependence, but we want it tamed, rather than excommunicated.

That's the goal of everybody. Now, if you have a solution to this
problem, by all means, let us know about it. So far, all the proposals
I have seen on this newsgroup came down to "I want to be able to mess
up the lexer/parser in arbitrary ways by defining my own syntax"
(which has nothing to do with taking advantage of hardware), and
"wouldn't it be nice if I could express the following machine-specific
feature so that it runs fast on every machine" (which is obviously a
contradiction).

					Thomas.