Re: Greetings from new member

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Gregg Reynolds <greynolds at greynolds dot com> wrote:
>
[snip..snip]
> 
> Understood, and basically agreed.  But don't misunderstand; it's not 
> really (for me) so much a matter of "us v. them", as the intriguing 
> question of what might happen if people could  "think computationally" 
> in their native languages.  I guess the larger theme is the relation 
> between natural language and formal language.  Plus, language design is 
> for me at least the most interesting and fun aspect of programming - it 
> would just be fun to design a language in Arabic.  I think your 
> instinct is probably correct that this isn't suitable as an immediate 
> goal for arabeyes - so much else to be done!

I agree too that it would be interesting, but this seems rather
academic and nothing we can seriously help with in any great manner.
In other words, although its interesting - anything we'll come up with
will have _very_ limited shelf-life (if any) and would be or little
use beyond it being "interesting".  In academia, on the other hand, it
might generate a windfall of ideas and shed new light on topics no one
has really thought about (that's what research if all about given anyone
is doing any research).  In short, if anyone is to undertake such work,
in my humble opinion, it should be the Universities/Collages.

> Still, it would be interesting to see what would happen if we had an 
> Arabic programming language.  Would people use it?  Maybe not.  
> Obviously you'd need the tools - editor and debugger at a minimum.  But 
> that's where I think Scheme is a good candidate - it's so simple all it 
> would take is translating a few keywords.  Well, ok, math would be an 
> issue, thanks to bidi.  Sigh.  (See my anti-bidi screed in my other 
> msg.)

You seem to have concrete ideas, give it a go and try it :-)

Salam.

 - Nadim


		
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