Missing properties

[Richard Gaskin]

Geoff Canyon wrote:

 > On Wed, Dec 10, 2014 at 12:16 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
 >
 >> The main goal of OL is two-fold:  to provide OS API access, and
 >> to allow custom components (libraries, widgets, etc.) to be
 >> integrated as smoothly in usage as engine-native routines and
 >> objects.
 >
 > I don't remember it being limited to that. I wish the original blog
 > entry at new language plugins
 > <http://blog.runrev.com/blog/bid/265511/Open-Language> were either
 > still in place, or available through archive.org.
 >
 > It isn't, so all I have to go on is my memory, but I remember being
 > very excited about  open language because one of my main concerns
 > about LC is that the language itself has stagnated. Ask an LC
 > developer what makes it so expressive and efficient and they might
 > point to URL syntax (~10 years old) or repeat-for-each (~20 years
 > old) or chunk syntax (pre-dates metacard).

If longevity of language features is inversely proportionate to their 
value, C must be a total waste of time. :)


 > I'm confident there is even more powerful english-like abstraction out
 > there that we haven't discovered because we're all used to doing
 > <whatever> the old way. Further, there are many syntactic
 > constructions already available in other languages that we could pull
 > in to LC easily if we had the ability to extend the syntax.

I'd vote for everything Robert Cailliau wants to do.  He shared your 
adventurous spirit for language evolution, and like you has a lot of 
great ideas.


 > That's what I want, and that's what I thought we were getting.
 > Maybe I'm misremembering.

Or I am.  I tend not to care too much about syntax nuance at this point. 
My situation is like Maslow's hierarchy of needs:  until I can simply 
play a video from a given starting point on Windows and Linux I don't 
really have much mental bandwidth for the flavor of the syntax I might 
use to not be able to do that. :)

But that's just me.

Whether or not Open Language is designed to allow complete dynamic 
transformation of language fundamentals, I would encourage pursuit of 
obviously-useful things like named parameters (and Cailliau's idea of 
named loops as well), and anything else that seems worth pursuing.

In the here-and-now, I share the general sentiment that more info on 
Open Language is overdue.

Ben, are you reading this?

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com