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The Shakespeare Programming Language

shakespearelang.sourceforge.net

32 pointsprattbhatt22 comments

The weirdest computer language I have ever seen.

The expressiveness of basic with the user-friendliness of the assembly language.

I am speechless...

My first thought was this could be a candidate for literate programming (http://www.literateprogramming.com/), but it's hard to parse and doesn't seem practical.

This is some kind of amazing.

I think this is great too. I've just finished reading through it for the first time - many more times will be necessary until I properly understand it, mind you - but I love seeing creative uses of programming languages like this.

I sent the link round the office a minute ago and one of my colleagues mentioned that it reminded him of Perligata[0]. I'd never heard of it, but it's apparently "a Perl module -- Lingua::Romana::Perligata -- that makes it possible to write Perl programs in Latin."

I've favourited that one for later reading, else I'll never get any work done this afternoon.

[0] - http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata....

Lord what fools these mortals be

"The design goal was to make a language with beautiful source code that resembled Shakespeare plays."

There is nothing beautiful about Shakespeare's plays in my opinion. I got taught a few of them in "English" class as a teenager. Despite apparently being "English" there was one page with the Shakespeare version of the text and a translation into normal / modern English on the page opposite it.

Then there is the iambic pentameter nonsense. Why? Does it actually add anything? Not that I can see.

Fast forward more than 20 years. Studying Shakepseare all those years back has had absolutely zero positive impact on my life.

Interesting. Always wondered how studying Shakespeare feels for native speakers. I had a hard time with Shakespeare, but enjoyed equivalent German poets a lot (though Goethe etc. worked more than a hundred years later ... no plain text translation is needed). Their language is plain beautiful, and getting their wit is like solving a riddle.

I'm a native English speaker and I find Goethe easier to read and understand than Shakespeare. In fact, although I love Shakespeare, it takes less mental energy to read Faust than it does to watch a performance of Hamlet.

Boring and pointless. See my comment with multiple down-votes above. (To be fair a lot of school seems like that when you are a teenager, but Shakespeare has stuck in my memory as being particularly boring, and particularly pointless).

In Spanish you can consider Cervantes and his work "Don Quijote" , as the top of the literature, more or less the Shakespeare in Spanish, not same style, Cervantes was novelist, and i can tell you that it was a PITA to read in our literature class in school because the language had little to do with modern Spanish and it was at the same time so rich in vocabulary that you had to read it with a dictionary next to you, and ended reading one of the "translations" to modern Spanish. As a curiosity Cervantes and Shakespeare died on the same date but different days , Gregorian and Julian calendars were used in Spain and England at that time.

"Always wondered how studying Shakespeare feels for native speakers"

I wasn't going to chime in, but I think you need another data point. Also, I had assumed that collyw was pulling our legs - his original comment seemed so much like satire. But now it seems that he's probably serious.

Shakespeare wrote in Elizabethan English, which is a somewhat archaic form of Modern English. It is immediately comprehensible to any native reader with normal language skills, who can read English at a high school level. Not fully comprehensible, but there is no obstacle to getting the gist, and much more.

I studied Hamlet with Frank McCourt. We had no "translation" and didn't need any. It is helpful when starting out to have a glossary of the archaic meanings of some words used by Shakespeare in a different sense from their most common meaning today. McCourt needed to explain almost nothing - he confined his teaching to sharing his love of the work and simply insisting that we pay attention to the words on the page and think about what the author was getting at. He mostly refused to explicate the frequent sexual innuendo, preferring that we figure it out ourselves.

Studying Hamlet was such an immensely powerful experience of aesthetic bliss that I can remember sitting in that classroom 40 years ago better than most things that happened last week. And I discovered the inner genius of Shakespeare: a blending of his characters' states of mind with the texture of language. This is why the idea of "translation" of this kind of literature is problematic.

Don't close yourself off from these potential joys because it takes a little effort.

"Studying Hamlet was such an immensely powerful experience of aesthetic bliss that I can remember sitting in that classroom 40 years ago better than most things that happened last week."

Interesting, that seems like satire to me! I studied more than enough Shakespeare to know I didn't like it and didn't gain anything from it.

I don't see how you can describe a "texture to the language" when most of it required reading a translation of it on the opposite page. I guess that much of the modern comedy that I see as being very smart and political may be lost on others.

Maybe not your fault. A bad teacher can make anything seem dull. I've heard some students even find math unexciting. (I love the scene in Monty Python's Meaning of Life where the teacher is actually copulating on the desk in front of the class, but his students are just bored).

"most of it required reading a translation of it on the opposite page"

As I said, it did not. And much of the class came from households where English was not spoken.

I downvoted you (and although previous guidelines were not to post about the reason, it seems as if dang would like us to share more about our thoughts on comments) not because you don't like Shakespeare, but because you seem unwilling to understand the context or significance of his work.

Obviously, you are entitled to your own opinion about whether Shakespeare's plays are good, but that they are English and show skilled use of meter and other poetic structures is really not up for debate.

Languages are constantly changing, less so with the invention of print and the internet, but they still change. For a trivial example, "selfie" was not a word 10 years ago. As words are added, words are also dropped. Even whole grammatical structures are added and dropped. This is all a normal part of language. So yes, Shakespeare's plays are not modern English, but they have a much closer resemblance to modern English than they do to Old English (a sample "Hwæt! wē Gār-Dena in ġeār-dagum, þēod-cyninga, þrym ġefrūnon, hū ðā æþelingas ellen fremedon.").

Similarly, tastes in literary structure change. At one point in English's past, extensive alliteration was valued even though it sounds very silly to modern ears. But again, Shakespeare's writing in this regard is still much closer to modern writing than it is to ancient writing.

Finally, it's worth noting that Shakespeare's works were written to be performed and watched, not read. Watching a live performance of Shakespeare is an entirely different experience.

"Languages are constantly changing"

I agree, so why do we need to study a version that is no longer in use and incomprehensible by the average person? Do you suggest that people go to study the first version of Java to make them a better programmer?

Studying Shakespeare is not like studying the first version of Java. It's like studying an extremely well-written program that happens to be written in the first version of Java. We wouldn't ignore a monumentally important program just because it wasn't in a modern dialect of Java (or in a more modern programming language). We don't study Shakespeare to study that period's English; we study Shakespeare to study literature. And we shouldn't ignore the monumental literary importance just because his work happens to be written in an older version of the language.

There will likely come a day when modern English has diverged far enough from Shakespeare's English to make Shakespeare genuinely incomprehensible to modern English speakers, but we are not there yet. Shakespeare is difficult (much less so when seen performed, I should emphasize again), but not incomprehensible like Beowulf or even The Canterbury Tales.

And when we can genuinely no longer understand Shakespeare that will be a sad day because there is always something lost when translating, especially when translating poetry or very poetic prose, and especially when the translator is not as skilled a writer as the person they are translating (which is almost an inevitability with translating Shakespeare).

I am sure Shakespeare is genuinely incomprehensible to many teenagers around the world.

Your comment's fine, but I should probably respond to:

> it seems as if dang would like us to share more about our thoughts on comments

I wouldn't say that, no. We should share our thoughts about the topic at hand. Commenting about comments is mostly off-topic.

(I've been doing it a lot, of course, as a way of providing transparency and feedback to the community. I fear this has the side effect of stimulating off-topic meta-comments in general. Hopefully this will straighten out over time.)

I could have sworn I saw a comment from you where you said that others could and should do as your are doing and telling people why their comments were not appropriate, but now I can't find it, so it must have been someone else. Oh well, no matter.

Anyway, while I know I have your attention, I really appreciate how active you've been in working on HN and making yourself available to the community.

Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, when users see a bad comment (i.e., either not substantive or not civil), it's ok to give feedback about why. Sama described that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7605973.

Thanks!

I love Shakespeare so much that I had to restrain my reflex to downvote...so in the interest of discussion ;)...I wonder what were you expecting from learning Shakespeare? It's been so long since my pre-Shakespeare days, but I do remember that by high school, he was so hyped up that it is completely feasible, logically speaking, that his adoration consists mostly of generations and generations of people drinking the kool-aid without questioning.

One thing I'll say: if your class focused on the modern English version, then yes, I could see why Shakespeare would be awful. His work sounds best in its "original" English, of course, but I find the work of deciphering it to also be part of the pleasure...especially when the talk involved entendres, the meanings of which somehow survived centuries of evolution in English.

http://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/hamlet.3.2.html

HAMLET Lady, shall I lie in your lap?

Lying down at OPHELIA's feet

OPHELIA No, my lord.

HAMLET I mean, my head upon your lap?

OPHELIA Ay, my lord.

HAMLET Do you think I meant country matters?

OPHELIA I think nothing, my lord.

HAMLET That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs.

OPHELIA What is, my lord?

HAMLET Nothing.

I wasn't expecting anything.

It was a compulsory part of my "English" class (I am a native speaker) . I don't think anyone could comprehend it - hence the translation on the opposite page.

As I say, I didn't find it beautiful, or inspiring. Just fairly pointless, trying to translate something from an antiquated version of English that I will likely never use to something we can understand. I gained nothing from studying it.

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