Language UNparseability

Posted Jun 9, 2013 6:22 UTC (Sun) by smurf (subscriber, #17840)
In reply to: Language UNparseability by mpr22
Parent article: Little things that matter in language design

I beg to differ; so far, the rocks decline to actually think. Not as we understand that word.

Which is the crux of the problem, because if the language is not easily parseable by both human and silicon processing, the meatbags will too easily assume that the code means something else than what the rocks interpret it as.

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Language UNparseability

Posted Jun 11, 2013 21:03 UTC (Tue) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link]

Perhaps we'll have to agree to disagree. I routinely use computers to solve some problems that I could solve myself by thinking, but which would take much longer that way. When the computer solves a problem using the same algorithm by which I would solve it by "thinking", then I think it's fair to say that the computer is doing some of my thinking for me.

The alternative would be to claim that if a computer solves a problem via a particular algorithm but is not thinking, that if I solve the same problem using the same algorithm I couldn't be said to be thinking either.

I certainly won't claim that everything the computer does is thinking, nor that the computer can do all the kinds of thinking that I can.