SUO: 26 May 2002 -- What Language To Use
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What Language To Use
Cf. http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg08547.html
I extend my earlier remarks under a separate heading.
Being blessed or cursed with the capacity to change my opinion,
every millennium or so, I find that the impact of the last two
years experience in the SUO Working Group has changed my sense
of the likely utility, the expected benefits and risks, of any
circumscribed formalism or reductive language in the practical
matter of describing complex realities and modelling the world,
whether in science or in engineering. I see now that I had no
real notion of the kinds of abuses to which dedicated language
abusers would be able to put their petrification of the syntax.
"Everyone knows the dangers of a prematurely rigidified symbolism"
is one of those things that I would have said, hopeless naïf that
I was, most likely the echo of all my catechizers who dinned that
lesson into my dim wits over the years, but now I see that others
were playing hooky somewhere, and have yet to learn true futility.
These days anybody with rapid prototyper and a prolog interpreter
can call themselves a programmer and a logician -- and these days
most anybody already has -- but some of us know what lies on both
sides of the rapids, but I guess that some will just have to find
that out when the man who sold them the rap has skipped outa town.
CL ("Cloister Logic") is still just vaporware,
and the circumstances surrounding its startup,
namely, to avoid the maculations of empirical
reality and the nuisances of being criticized
in the "open world", do not hold out a lot of
promise for its future.
http://philebus.tamu.edu/pipermail/kif/2000-December/000122.html
In short, one of the founding principles of this effort
is the same old, tired old line that science reduces to
deductive logic, and first order logic to boot.
£$¥ Bottom Line. We do not need "yet another proprietary format" (YAPF),
presidio-ed over by a "maintaining body", deliberately out of touch with
the way that those who generate the knowldege are already given to think.
Jon Awbrey
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