Re: Where does the drive to syntax come from?

BTW I've just finished your paper on ContextL - really interesting stuff, very impressive.

On 2005-09-13 20:15:25 -0400, Pascal Costanza <pc@xxxxxxxxx> said:

I think Alan Kay is right with the characterization that we are still in the very early phase of computer science, and we are still trying just to imitate what we already know instead of trying to figure out the possibilities.

Or maybe we imitate what we already know with machines of our own design because we can change these machines and the interface to these machines much more easily and quickly than we can change the genetic endowment and cognitive history of our species. What is the device with a microprocessor in it most commonly used by people? The cell phone. Why? Because it requires little or no change in the way people have communicated for the last 50,000 years. You just pick it up and talk.

I recall him stating that it took about 200 years after the invention of letterpress that people started to make use of the actual possibilities of books. He identifies that point in time when the first book was published that actually had page numbers. This allowed people to develop much more comprehensive arguments and theories. Until then, books only imitated what people already knew - speech. Essentially, thoughts couldn't be more complicated than one page.

Preliterate peoples are more than capable of sustaining arguments of more than a page length. If anything their memories are better than those of literate people. Remember that the whole Odyssey was routinely recited from memory. Just because Alan Kay said it doesn't make it true. Before Gutenberg we have astronomical works of the Chinese and the Maya, the dialogs of Plato, Archimedes' proofs, the works of Indian and Arabic mathematicians - many of these much more than a page and quite complex.

After adding page numbers, people started to be able to refer to different parts of the same book, which is a big improvement. And this actually led to development of new and more sophisticated theories about all aspects of our world.

The great impact of the printing press was that it allowed mass production and portability (printed books could be smaller), which allowed information to spread more quickly. Page numbering was not why printed books revolutionized human communication, rapid disemination of large quantities of information was. Instead of just talking with your neighbor you could now hear from scores of people from around the planet and across time.

People are able to adapt to new ways of doing things.

And yet with all of these novel possibilities, your whole post consists of natural language not very different than you might have spoken it in a conversation. Why? Because people are absolute wizzards at natural language since our recent evolutionary past consists almost entirely of life in small illiterate groups. We have brains specialized for it and engage in continual practice of it from infancy onward. As a result we excel at thinking about the world in the natural language pattern of noun-verb-preposition (not necessarily in that order of course). Since we have the circuitry and practiced skills for it, seems like computer interfaces ought to leverage that paradigm. I heard about one once that was very much like spoken language, what was it called...? Oh yeah - Smalltalk. It was invented by this guy called Alan Kay...

  ... of course he wrote it in lisp. ;^)

The future of computer interfaces should be the next step beyond Smalltalk. Even more like natural language. But it should also be able to go in the other direction when needed, down toward the machine. That means it should probably be developed in an extensible language. Sounds like another job for lisp.

regards

.

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