Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Libre Business for the Planet

[Thomas HARDING]

On 10/03/2015 18:37, Logan Streondj wrote:
> Contents:
> - Financing
> - Planet-wide Project
> - Unifying Vision
> - Large Noosphere
> - Big Itch
> - Amount Solved

> 1. Large future Noosphere.
>
> Right now, Libre Software, is limited to English speakers,
> either first or second language.  English is the native language of
> only 300 million people, and even with second langauge speakers, it is
> at 1.2 billion, less than the 1.3 billion of Mandarin.
> Reality is that we have over 7 billion people on the planet,
> and there are over 6,000 languages.
As a French native speaker, my first attempts to programming
has for language a French-ed Fortran
(forgot the name, it was in the heighteen's, on SIl-Z2 computer
at technical high school).

It is the case also for formal programming (the earlier phase of
any program, among the numerous modelling methods).

Where the point is missed is : at low level (effective: excerpt for
libraries function names), most of languages has for name entries
a very limited set of "keywords". Much more : even translated, these
keywords will not follows in any way orthographic nor syntactic
natural language rules (plural, gender, terses, ...).

I taked a look at code from a colleague written in a French proprietary
ide/language named "Windev". Keywords are French, but it (sintactically)
have nothing to do with French language.

On the other hand, I heard for era about "cweb", from D. Knuth,
(but never took a look at any cweb code, I'm lazy...). The described
approach is ... to describe what does code does as long as writing
the program itself, then pre-process that we call otherwise "comments"
and nested code to produce the code itself, then compile.

As any lazy programmer, my comments are generally fuzzy and/or
simply missing (while code stays sometimes comprehensive by fair
"naming").

So, a good approach would be : model after cweb because of a true
natural language structure, then translate keywords as possible where
implemented/translated languages "spells". In fact I would be curious
about lex on a language BIG5 set based.

> SPEL allows for creation of native-like human languages as input,
> and can output to both human and computer languages.
> With the 20+ languages it currently supports,
> it can theoretically allow over 4 billion people to co-operate,
> as if they were all speaking the same language,
> and programming in the same langauge.
> Extending for more languages is easy.
Unfortunately I found only references on Java/Spring about "SPEL".
Filtering out gives for result "SIGPLAN" and Spel workgroup.

If not based on coffee, I'm curious of a bunch of URI you could post
about SPEL :)
> the native-like human languages do take at least a few days
> or weeks of study to use by a native speaker,
> though less than learning a foreign language,
> and likely less than learning programming for the first time.
>
> It would eventually be possible to have support for the vast majority
> of human and computer languages.
Regards,
TSFH