The Myth of the Muttering Madman is a project in self-realization.

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Writing programs to solve a problem is something akin to developing a language in the context of the problem to be solved and creating a sufficiently flexible and powerful vocabulary to describe and solve issues related to that problem.

The expressiveness of a language is the effectiveness with which this can be done. Programming paradigms, such as procedural definitions, object oriented modeling, functional languages, logic programming and other paradigms are philosophical ideas for providing tools for solving these problems. Lisp is supposedly so powerful because it makes the process of creating these higher language abstractions easier. How about something like Parrot then? How easy is it to write a language on top of Parrot to solve problems? Surely not as convenient or a simple as Lisp, but easier than writing an language without any help whatsoever...

Would it make sense say, to create a language to model sounds and provide a convenient grammar for defining musical performances (to ease live performing for example) and use Parrot as the language target? If so how would you model this? What constructs would you need? What would the grammar look like?

These are just ideas. Shows how little I really understand :D

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