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by pgt 3385 days ago
Interesting. Considering language as a lever and a tool for thought, how do you think the position of a language on the analytic/synthetic spectrum affects its suitability for computer interpretation?

Are there any major Japanese programming languages? It would seem to me that given our relatively primitive compilers, that 'analytic' languages offer simpler mediums for unambiguous programming, whereas 'synthetic' languages may bear greater nuance of expression when we can 'think' programs into existence in the future.

5 comments

I advise extreme caution when going down this path... it's rife with established lines of pseudoscientific thought. For example, a couple centuries ago you could talk about how English just isn't complex enough to express great ideas the way Latin and Greek are.

Ambiguity is an orthogonal concept to morphological typology, however. There is no extra "nuance of expression" just because you conjugate words more, that's just nonsense.

There's one pretty famous and you may already know it.

> Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

> He has often said that he is “trying to make Ruby natural, not simple,” in a way that mirrors life.

> Building on this, he adds: Ruby is simple in appearance, but is very complex inside, just like our human body.

These will not be considered strictly scientific articles, but appear reasonable..

[http://carlosplusplus.github.io/blog/2013/08/01/ruby-and-the...] - [https://robots.thoughtbot.com/learning-japanese-the-rubyist-...]

>Interesting. Considering language as a lever and a tool for thought, how do you think the position of a language on the analytic/synthetic spectrum affects its suitability for computer interpretation?

Interesting question. I remember reading article many years ago in BYTE magazine, someone, maybe one of the regular columnists who wrote about programming languages, speculating that if a programming language came out of the Orient, it might be different in some interesting ways from existing ones, which mainly came from the West, I suppose, though of course there could have been Oriental contributors to existing ones. For a long time after that I never heard of any such language; then came Ruby.

Well, APL is damned near polysynthetic, if that's your bag. But like Cree or Ojibwe, you won't really "speak" it fully, fluently and with nuance until adolescence.
Ruby comes from Japan