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0 pointscharcircuit4y ago0 comments

Just because a teacher can describe steps, that doesn't mean that it would be easy to make a computer do it. For example a teacher may say to find Waldo in an image: "scan for people from left to right, top to bottom, and stop when you find a guy in a red and white shirt." This would not work well as a programming language. How should this be compiled? How do you know if someone is a person, how do you know if they are wearing stripped clothes, what exactly counts as red?

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ModernMech4y ago· 2 in thread

Like I said, children can be just as pedantic as computers, especially when they’re trying.

Anyway, the language you describe wouldn’t work well as a tool, but not all programming languages are tools and are still worth making.

Using your example, this language could be a fun DSL for interacting with pictures. “Find all cars and make them red” I could imagine a backend tied to machine learning algorithms and a database query engine to make this possible. Parse with nlp, extract a query, form a plan with appropriate backends, execute, render output image. I dunno how useful that is, it would be fun and doable. You just gave me a great idea for my next senior capstone group. Thanks.

charcircuitOP4y ago

>Like I said, children can be just as pedantic as computers, especially when they’re trying.

Yes, but what are the chances that they make their new language that is not influenced by any other programming related knowledge to be specified at the right abstraction level using abstractions that are easy to implement? A language that they come up with is not going to be good. Similarly if you were to ask a non engineer to design you an airplane, it wouldn't be a good design. Experts are always going to be able to do a better job than those with less knowledge. I personally do not even think a kid is going to come up with some revolutionary concept that should be included into a language designed by experts.

ModernMech4y ago

> that is not influenced by any other programming related knowledge to be specified at the right abstraction level using abstractions that are easy to implement?

Why do they need to be easy to implement? We're talking about design. A lot of PL design is hard to implement. And why does it need to be programming related knowledge? We shouldn't restrict them to things that are easy to implement because then we'd restrict them to a very small subset of possible languages.

So when you say "A language they come up with is not going to be good", then I have to ask how are we measuring good? Because if you think that a teacher would not write a good programming language to write programs in, then I would probably agree with you, because writing programs is not something teachers do.

But like I said, not all programming languages are used to make programs. Most people use a programming language to do things that decidedly don't look like programming to you and I. For example a lot of developers consider Excel to be a not good language for writing programs. Programmers usually lament that Excel users would be better served by a "proper database", but they neglect to appreciate that making this change would quite literally ruin the tool for them. But there are more Excel programmers than all other developer-centric languages combined.

I think a teacher who uses Excel to to manage their classes could design a very compelling DSL for classroom automation.

> I personally do not even think a kid is going to come up with some revolutionary concept

We were talking about teachers designing the language. The children came into the picture because they would provide teachers a model for relating to the pedantic nature of computers.

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