gordonguthrie

Rules as Code is an emerging field with law is annotated with a structured and compliable representation. The target has hithertoo been calculation libraries for social security/tax. This paper looks at compiling to generative property-based system tests.

I should also point out that there are half a dozen different Esperanto speakers commenting in Espera to on this thread

Esperantujo is Esperanto events

From a practical perspective - the nearest Uni was St Petersburg - if you had to guess how many comparative grammers of say Russian/Ndebele Russian/Cherokee Russian/Urdu were available in late 19th C Biyalostok? I would go for 0

Yes there are structural reasons that inform Esperanto as a Romance-lexified Western Slavonic - but it is hard to argue that it could be anything but structural - how could Zamenhof personally have chosen different?

Except a couple of million speak it - to a degree - and it has been going organically for over a century and shows no sign of dying

For an amateur, living at the fringes of both Europe and the Russian empire, I think the boy Zamenhof done good for the 19th century

'designed without a global audience in mind' - it was exactly designed with a global audience in mind - but I think Zemnhof didn't have the exposure to the width of linguistic research he would have now

My mum used to say to me and my brothers "what's your name Pa'erson with 2 tees" whenever we said bu'er or wa'er - I can assure you that the glottal stop is widely used in dialects on the English continuum in Scotland ;-)

And the case system differentiates between indirect objects of motion and position (like Polish) and doesn't have a genitive (which German does)

And also English has like 12-16 vowel sounds and Esperanto (like the Slavics) has half that many

Except that Zamenhof spoke Slavic languages as a native - and not German nor English - and specifically chose Romance languages to relexify - there is no discernable German or English influence on the language

I just turned on the sofa and asked my Orla if she thought Alexa in Esperanto would be a good idea and to my surprise she said yes ;-)

Except that there is a Slavic continuum. The spoken language of the border is Polish if written in the (catholic) Latin-derived script and (orthodox) Belorussian if written in Cyrillic or a (muslim) Polish Tartar if written in the Arabic script - which was still being used until the 1980s in that corner of the world - likewise Polish/Ukrainian and Polish/Czech

Not often Esperantists get accused of living in the future tho ;-)

It clearly is a Western Slavonic language relexified into Romance - the orthography has the characteristic Slavic 1 symbol/1 sound and is distinctly Hussite (ie accents on a short Latin). The core case system has 4 cases (down from the 6/7 of Polish) - except with remnants of more in the Correlatives.

Modern Hebrew - created by a colleague of Zamenhof is also a Western Slavonic - except relexified into Semintic (so I believe - I have no Hebrew).

It all makes the Western Slavonics a super interesting language group...

A 10 word sentence has 10! possible word orders of which only 1 is correct - that is grammer

Historically we were taught Latin grammer disguised as English grammer - so 'tenses' when English only has two tenses (past and present) and 6 or more moods (shall, could, will, might etc, etc)

Most English 'grammer' discussed in the Anglophone world (split infinitives WTF? English doesn't have infinitives) is gibberish...

Compared to working from a book it is ace - you get listening, speaking, reading and writing and it gets you where you want to be

I did the first three levels of Ukranian and when I went to Lvyv I picked out a couple of hundred words in shops and restau

Could I speak? No, but Duolingo gets you onto the pitch faster and better than anyone else - it gets you in play fast - so you can start learning the language properly

Well I'm an Erlang enthusiast not an APL one, my APL experience is reading a manual for 4 hours on a plane and 4 hours writing APL

There are a squad of specific set related problems in Riak that the Basho engineers skirted round or were afraid of - and they were all about Set operations - so APL's focus on tiny notational programmes that are graspable in the mind is appealing for that basis.

Is this the most considered blog post? No, hell no ;-) but APL struck me as fascinating...

Riak the database so indestructable that is survives its parent companies demise is going into code freeze for its first post-bankruptcy release even as we speak

I am writing another post which will describe better the niche I think it should fill - an auxiliary language used to write library modules which would be called from applications written in Elixir or Erlang.

The functionality that would be replaced is currently written by traversing lists - this really is a business-rules language add-on to existing infrastructure rather than a high-performance array processing language.

I only tweeted it at my Erlang chums is why, didn't expect anyone else to care

But none of the examples I cite need 'high performance' (well CRDTs do) an expressive language for sets would remove accidental complexity and make more complex things simpler and less buggy

Minor politician, ya cheeky git ;-)

All language has rules - there is no language 'without formal rules'

[takes a bow]

The Christmas Tree worm - only affected IBM 360 mainframes. We got hit by that - must have been '86?

It was an accident as well - it picked up your mailbox contacts and forwarded it itself, but it still had a debug flag set so you got a notification email from every forwarding hop. 10,000 emails each, thank you very much...

Jeezo, fair takes ye back!

Techmeetup http://techmeetup.co.uk/ already covers all of Scotland and has goodish contacts with UCL and Seedcamp and stuff...

Pretty much unknown?

Sulla and Marius had a civil war and Marius's nephew was Caesar

Post-civil war US - replace Sulla and Marius with Lincoln and Jefferson...