[ssivark]

> What I'd like to ask the HN brain is if anyone can think of another way to express a higher level thought other than language? In his essay, Naur implies that there is no such thing. I wonder if we had made any progress on that front in the 35 years that have elapsed since this essay was written.

I think it could be argued that category theory, and categorical thinking more generally are basically in this spirit. There’s a reason why a lot of folks think it’s the best thing since sliced bread.

The basic idea is that it has a sharply crystallized notion of what it means to have an analogy, which can piggy back on top of a bunch of essential structures from math to provide a language that is very effective for communication. Of course it’s only effective in communicating with people who share enough of that context.

As an example of this spirit of using rigorous reasoning to communicate better is the Haskell motto that the existence of “design patterns” imply a failure of the language for lack of expressiveness (more of a relative statement than absolute). If your language is any good, and your understanding of the pattern is sharp enough, then you should just be able to factorize it into a library. This lends to a programming style with highly modular, declarative and terse code.

Disclaimer: I’m not a Haskell expert by any means, so YMMV.

[mbrock]

"His hair is a flat-top; his mouth frowns in near grimace. He strides to my seat, looks down and says in a Texas drawl, 'and the key is simply this: Abstractions. New and better abstractions. With them we can solve all our programming problems.'"

— Richard P. Gabriel, “Patterns of Software”