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ForumsDiscussion Forum → tell me what languages you know
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tell me what languages you know
2017-06-10, 11:42 AM #1
Let's hear it
former entrepreneur
2017-06-10, 11:45 AM #2
Do programming languages count, or...?
2017-06-10, 11:48 AM #3
Yep
former entrepreneur
2017-06-10, 12:04 PM #4
interpret "language" as liberally as you want
former entrepreneur
2017-06-10, 12:05 PM #5
I write all of my software exclusively in IBM/360 assembly code, and document it in Esperanto.
2017-06-10, 12:07 PM #6
Beyond that... I am a Parselmouth.
2017-06-10, 12:11 PM #7
WHAT ARE YOU HIDING
former entrepreneur
2017-06-10, 12:12 PM #8
English
2017-06-10, 12:18 PM #9
I am shamefully monolingual.

For programming, I am comfortable with Python and C++ (and could recall C from when I wrote it 6 years ago if you gave me an afternoon) from coursework and research. If you count them (which you shouldn't) I suppose I am also proficient in Mathematica and MATLAB, but I'd rather be shot than do more than simple calculations or very quickly render plots in either of them.

I do use LaTeX quite a bit, though. I honestly find the processing of writing something in LaTeX relaxing, and if I had the free time would totally typeset peoples' theses for an absurd price because they're too lazy to exit M$ Word.


e- in retrospect let's delete the last part of this post
I had a blog. It sucked.
2017-06-10, 12:30 PM #10
Originally posted by Zloc_Vergo:
I went to engineering camp once in high school, and they asked us how many languages you know. Of course this was the immediate response of the kids. Cue a room full of autists circle jerking over how many languages they could remember how to write "Hello World!" in. Kids said **** like TI-BASIC or "assembly (unspecified)" and even as a 17 year old I was just in shock at how obnoxious it was.

I am fluent in COG.
2017-06-10, 12:33 PM #11
Originally posted by Zloc_Vergo:
I do use LaTeX quite a bit, though. I honestly find the processing of writing something in LaTeX relaxing, and if I had the free time would totally typeset peoples' theses for an absurd price because they're too lazy to exit M$ Word.


Programming in LaTeX is 50% knowing how to read documentation and 50% copying and pasting from Stack Exchange. There's not much of a learning curve. I just typed up homework in LaTeX for a quarter and now I'm fairly competent at it.

Though it does have lots of oddities that are hard to explain.
2017-06-10, 1:00 PM #12
I wouldn't say that something is definitionally easy because the answers to unintuitive problems exist in a knowledge base (but certainly, stackexchange does represent a qualitative inprovement from the days of Usenet, and it certainly would pose a threat to a business model centered around dispensing obscure snippets of meddlesome TeX).
2017-06-10, 1:05 PM #13
True, but then I wouldn't have been able to shoehorn a joke into my post.
2017-06-10, 2:19 PM #14
I speak American and Marine. I'm planning on picking up LISP and and I can sound out words in Arabic script, but that probably doesn't count.
Epstein didn't kill himself.
2017-06-10, 2:37 PM #15
Originally posted by Spook:
LISP


Unless you want to time-travel to the 60's, you can just write it as Lisp.

Unless you meant LiSP, which you can search for using a case-sensitive search engine (suck on it, Google).
2017-06-10, 3:01 PM #16
English is the best human language for information processing so there is no reason to understand any other, and I don't.

I'm also fluent in several dialects of "imperative" and "declarative", and I'm conversational in "proof".
2017-06-10, 3:20 PM #17
Having dispensed of the question of knowing languages of the artificial as well as English, the question of writing arises. I am sure you are familiar of the works of Leslie Lamport. In this paper he talks about a way to clearly interleave English and "proof".


Abstract:

Quote:
A method of writing proofs is described that makes it harder to prove things that are not true. The method, based on hierarchical structuring, is simple and practical. The author’s twenty years of experience writing such proofs is discussed.

2017-06-10, 3:23 PM #18
[QUOTE=Leslie Lamport]I can offer only two general pieces of advice on how to think. The first is to write. As the cartoonist Guindon once wrote, “writing is nature’s way of showing you how fuzzy your thinking is.” [/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=Leslie Lamport]
Writing is difficult for two reasons: (i) writing requires thought and thinking is difficult, and (ii) the physical act of putting thoughts into words is difficult. There’s not much you can do about (i), but there’s a straightforward solution to (ii) — namely, writing. The more you write, the easier the physical process becomes. I recommend that you start practicing with email. Instead of just dashing off an email, write it. Make sure that it expresses exactly what you mean to say, in a way
that the reader will be sure to understand it.
[/QUOTE]

Source: http://www.budiu.info/blog/lamport.html
2017-06-10, 3:30 PM #19
Also, I don't think I've seen a more clearly written document than Leslie Lamport's annotated bibliography of his own collected work. It is at once hypertext and prose, which reads like a novel and a document of history (he even recalls the history of papers he wrote long ago enough that there are no longer existent copies available).

The man also invented this thing called LaTeX, so of course you can also read the typeset version.
2017-06-10, 3:56 PM #20
Here's what Galileo had to say about the language of nature:

Quote:
Philosophy is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes -- I mean the universe -- but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.


from the epitaph to the first chapter of Functional Differential Geometry, by Gerald Jay Sussman and Jack Wisdom (AI Memo 2005-003):

Abstract:

Quote:
Differential geometry is deceptively simple. It is surprisingly easy
to get the right answer with unclear and informal symbol ma-
nipulation. To address this problem we use computer programs
to communicate a precise understanding of the computations in
differential geometry. Expressing the methods of differential ge-
ometry in a computer language forces them to be unambiguous
and computationally effective. The task of formulating a method
as a computer-executable program and debugging that program
is a powerful exercise in the learning process. Also, once formal-
ized procedurally, a mathematical idea becomes a tool that can
be used directly to compute results.

[/FONT]
2017-06-10, 5:43 PM #21
Originally posted by Reverend Jones:
Unless you want to time-travel to the 60's, you can just write it as Lisp.

Unless you meant LiSP, which you can search for using a case-sensitive search engine (suck on it, Google).


I meant an emphatic gay speech affectation.
Epstein didn't kill himself.
2017-06-10, 5:56 PM #22
Hm, well I guess it was the ALL CAPS representation of the word that (jokingly?) precipitated the (un?-)intended capture.

I guess you could always take this to another level and open a gay bar that fetishizes the λ-calculus.
2017-06-10, 6:01 PM #23
i am fluent in all context free languages, which is convenient for when i talk to simpletons who only understand regular languages
I had a blog. It sucked.
2017-06-10, 6:04 PM #24
it's not all bad though, context free or regular, they both get me pumped.
I had a blog. It sucked.
2017-06-10, 6:10 PM #25
Alan Turing recognized quite a few languages, but he couldn't recognize when he couldn't recognize a language.
I had a blog. It sucked.
2017-06-10, 7:14 PM #26
Originally posted by Zloc_Vergo:
i am fluent in all context free languages, which is convenient for when i talk to simpletons who only understand regular languages


Not sure if you're speaking English or a nonsensical language generated by the same grammar.
2017-06-10, 7:53 PM #27
Originally posted by Reverend Jones:
Hm, well I guess it was the ALL CAPS representation of the word that (jokingly?) precipitated the (un?-)intended capture.

I guess you could always take this to another level and open a gay bar that fetishizes the λ-calculus.


it's in all caps because I'm a TOP
Epstein didn't kill himself.
2017-06-10, 7:58 PM #28
it's always easy to get sexprs with a nice car.
2017-06-10, 8:20 PM #29
I read and write English. As far as a language spoken and written by a politically-defined culture in the traditional sense, I theoretically know how to speak and write some basic French, but most of that knowledge seems to be fading away.

As for programming languages, in theory, I know basic HTML and things that involve hex code like CSS, and even more theoretically, I understand object-oriented programming and C# as I see it used at work, but in practice, apart from maybe some HTML, it's Greek to me.

As for other theoretical "languages", it could be said I'm fluent in a "gaming" language, though I'd be very hesitant to actually define that as anything disciplined that one would say is a shared and well-defined "language" (though I've read plenty of stuff that's attempted to do so). I'm also mildly knowledgeable about other "languages" relating to broad art disciplines, specifically animation.

If memes count, I'm fluent in those too. :P
The Plothole: a home for amateur, inclusive, collaborative stories
http://forums.theplothole.net
2017-06-10, 8:23 PM #30
Memes are just the limescale that accumulates after enough people flush their minds down the series of tubes.
2017-06-10, 11:37 PM #31
Ski-Bi dibby dib yo da dub dub
Yo dab dub dub
Ski-Bi dibby dib yo da dub dub
Yo dab dub dub

Ski-Ba-Bop-Ba-Dop-Bop
Ba-Bop-Ba-Dop-Bop
Ski-Ba-Bop-Ba-Dop-Bop
Ba-Bop-Ba-Dop-Bop
Dop-Ba-Bop-Ba
Star Wars: TODOA | DXN - Deus Ex: Nihilum
2017-06-11, 12:37 AM #32
I invented a pretty strange language, actually. Back in my undergrad.

It's a declarative language where the input to every function is a "table", and the output of the function is some disjoint assignment of "rows" to categories, described by a predicate, or an exception if no assignment is possible. For example, if you wanted a function that takes a set of numbers, and returns two disjoint subsets, the first containing 10 numbers between 1 and 10, and the second containing 10 numbers between 5 and 8 (yes the ranges overlap), that would be a 3-liner in this language: one line for the function signature, and one line for each of the predicates (I was going through a Python phase).

Of course it wasn't limited to numbers; the tables could have arbitrary fields (and a single 'quantity' field). The predicates could key off of any combination of fields as long as the categories they described were disjoint or proper subsets of all of the other categories. Normally something like this would involve integer linear programming, but because it was limited in this way I was able to find a reduction to network max flow, so my solver would always run in polynomial time.

It's generally useful for resource allocation type problems where you have a large number of heterogeneous "things" and you're trying to assign them to designated roles. Like for a more practical example, if you had a million soldiers, 700k have marksmanship training, 400k of them have medic training, 300k of them have engineer training, and 100k of them are officers. Not everybody can do every job, but you've got enough overlap to make things confusing. If you actually need 400k marksmen, 40k marksman officers, 400k medics, 10k medic officers, 200k engineers and 30k engineer officers, all working at those roles full-time, this language will let you concisely define the proble, and the solver will efficiently tell you exactly how to divide up your forces (if possible).

It's the kind of language that I'm sure some rich company working in some obscure domain would literally kill to have, but I've got no ****ing clue who that'd be.
2017-06-11, 1:12 AM #33
Originally posted by Jon`C:
it's always easy to get sexprs with a nice car.


Some of my best sex personal records were in my 77 cadillac eldorado
Epstein didn't kill himself.
2017-06-11, 1:36 AM #34
That actually sounds pretty neat, Jon.

I have a question, though: has somebody here been dabbling in Markov-chain forum bots?

The specific bot to which I am referring is the "poster" known as Spook.
2017-06-11, 1:41 AM #35
spuuk's a nub

https://forums.massassi.net/vb3/showthread.php?56049-beautiful-and-sweet-words
Star Wars: TODOA | DXN - Deus Ex: Nihilum
2017-06-11, 1:44 AM #36
WTF is that

I think that tibby's question deserves an answer.
2017-06-11, 1:49 AM #37
What's a Horn clause
2017-06-11, 2:05 AM #38
Nvm i looked at the wikipedia and there's a bunch of linguisticy words and im too drunk for that
2017-06-11, 2:07 AM #39
Wikipedia-induced anxiety is a thing. Pedagogical, that website is not. Mmmmph.

(Ask your local logic programming junkie instead....)
2017-06-11, 2:34 AM #40
From the 11th page of section 7.1.1: "Boolean basics", of Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming (Volume 4a, p. 57):

Quote:
Simple special cases. Two important classes of Boolean formulas have been identified for which the satisfiability problem does turn out to be pretty easy. These special cases arise when the conjunctive normal form being tested consists entirely of "Horn clauses" or entirely of "Krom clauses." A Horn clause is an OR literal in which all or nearly all of the literals​ are complemented-at most one of its literals is a pure, unbarred variable. A Krom clause is an OR clause of exactly two literals.

[...]

For this [elided above, not doing TeX on a phone, sorry, go buy the book] reason, parameterized Horn clauses were chosen to be the basic underlying mechanism of the programming language Prolog. Furthermore there is an easy way to characterize exactly which Boolean functions can be represented entirely with Horn clauses:

[...]
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