Cree#, a morphemic programming language with Cree keywords and concepts

Oh, sure; morphophonological processes do tend to mess up everything. (This is why Valentine doesn’t give a morpheme-by-morpheme gloss of the example I included.) This is why I don’t claim that such a programming language will be _exactly_ like human agglutination — only that it will have a very different structure to our languages. The complexities of human languages will always need to be simplified and regularised in order to create a programming language.

> But look at your smalltalk example: does that look like English syntax? First, the word order is wrong, and second, "onTopOf" already is a concatenation.

I agree that Smalltalk syntax doesn’t look at all like English syntax, at least in terms of word order. (If anything, it looks a lot more like Burmese.) And it is true that early languages like RPG and SNOBOL — and I should include assembly here as well — have little to do with any human language. But that’s not the central component of my claim. What’s important here is that, for most if not all modern programming languages, you can construct a syntax tree, like this:

        ┌────────┴─────────┐
        │            ┌─────┴────┐
     ┌──┴──┐         │       ┌──┴──┐
    you lieDown; position: (table onTopOf)

        ┌───┴───┐
        │    ┌──┴───┐
     ┌──┴─┐  │   ┌──┴──┐
    Lie down on the table

    incorporated.noun - directional - instrumental - distributive - indirect.object - direct.object - specific.locative - general.locative - 1A.prefixes - STEM - adverb - diminutive - intention - ability - mood - deduction - modality - dubitative - hearsay - auditory - tense - consequence - sent.func = enclitics

And I'm not saying that because I think those things are inherently more valuable (they might be - I don't really know), I'm saying that because a programming language has to interact with hardware. And at least our current generation of computational hardware requires precision and repeatability or it doesn't work. And I don't mean doesn't work as in "fails". I mean the literal foundation of the space is built on logic gates - Small devices that have very specific, repeatable, and precise outputs for a given input.

The requirements for precision and repeatability are SO ingrained that it's genuinely hard for us to introduce real randomness to the process.

---

So stepping back a moment - I think the issue at hand is really how we define "programming language". I see them as tools to control hardware that has fundamental requirements (at least right now) around repeatability and precision.

This uses languages that do have those properties to create another abstraction layer which no longer provides them (or does provide them, but through a black box that hides or obfuscates how they're being applied in a manner that simulates not providing them, it's actually really hard to tell based on the content of the article)

It means that there's a fundamental gap between the capabilities of the two.

---

A programming language can program hardware. This is an application for turning stories into visual output written in languages that can control hardware (Go and C#).

It's a cool application in much the same way that NetLogo is a very nifty toy to introduce beginners to language/concepts/terms that are used in programming.

So in that sense, I think the creator has mostly hit the mark he's going for. But it's not general - it can't step outside of that space. It's more akin to a domain specific language that has to operate within the context of his specific editor/application.

So just like Photoshop is not "a programming language", I don't really see this as a language.

> the available evidence clearly indicates that the demographic collapse was not uniform in either timing or magnitude and may have been caused by factors other than epidemic disease. ... Despite the trauma of conquest, Native Americans continued to have their own histories, intertwined with but not entirely determined by Europeans and their pathogens.

Since that was written, the evidence has swung even more strongly towards the idea that disease was intimately associated with the close, persistent contacts needed for the "conquest" and missionary activities of colonial powers.

Not to mention, similar epidemics were observed among indigenous southern africans and siberians during their respective colonizations. The Americas were unique in the scale and completeness of their disruption, but not in the mechanisms.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-009-9036-8

The Canadian government forcibly took indigenous children away from their parents to be taught at religious schools where they'd be beaten if they spoke their indigenous language. The goal was literal cultural genocide and to erase indigenous nations and cultures from the continent.

This was not "inevitable" but instead an active policy goal the government persued.

The Maya and Aztec had writing in the form of hieroglypics. The Inca had persistent communication via Quipu's rope knots.

(I learned this from _Guns, Germs, and Steel_ which is a phenomenal book. I haven't done other research, though, so maybe the book isn't a good source.)

Your post could be applied to the Vietnamese writing system, for example. Or to the many other languages that have adopted variants of the Arabic, Cyrillic, and Latin writing systems.

No society is frozen in time.

Mesoamerica had at least one family of complete writing systems (I'll call this Maya, although whether or not they invented it or adapted it from others is debated), and another proto-writing system that may well evolved into a full writing system (the Aztecs, who at the time of contact appear to have been in the early stages of planning a conquest of the Maya). Andean cultures had a maybe-it's-a-writing-system-unlike-any-other, the quipus.

Of course, positing a less domineering conquest, it is very likely that cultures may well have developed their own indigenous writing systems via contact with Europeans--that is precisely what the Cherokee did. I doubt they would have stubbornly refused to pick up any writing systems.

> That should be a signal as to how 'far apart' colonialists and aboriginals were with respect to development of cultural institutions.

Yeah, Tenochtitlan had public zoos and museums, organized anthropology, universal primary education, ethnic quarters, professional sports leagues at a time when all of those concepts would take another few centuries to be 'invented' in Europe.

Oh, wait, were you suggesting that it was the Americas that was culturally backward?

> The writing you see in this post is invented by a Canadian-English Methodist Priest in the mid 10th century for the benefit of the aboriginals. The system, in current terms is itself 'firmly colonialist' (I'm sure someone will cynically characterize it as a form of oppression).

My understanding is that the modern indigenous groups see the use of the syllabics as less oppressive than being forced to use Latin, as the syllabics are designed to more closely match the language than using the Latin script.

As a point of comparison, there are 2.9 million registered Native Americans, and 5.2 million people who check that box, sometimes along with others, on the latest census.