meaning

Mountains, Molehills, and Markedness

In my previous three posts, I explained why the semantics of programming languages are not as rich as they could be. I pointed out some symptoms of that deficit, and then made recommendations about bridging the gap. Finally I introduced “marks”–a feature of the intent programming language I’m creating–and gave you a taste for how they work.

In this post, I’m going to offer more examples, so you see the breadth of their application.

Aside

Before I do, however, I can’t resist commenting a bit on the rationale for the name “marks”.

In linguistics, markedness is the idea that some values in a language’s conceptual or structural systems should be assumed, while others must be denoted explicitly through morphology, prosodics, structural adjustments, and so forth. Choices about markedness are inseparable from worldview and from imputed meaning. Two quick examples:
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Thoughts On Bridging the “Lacuna Humana”

In my previous post, I discussed the semantic gaps that afflict current programming languages. These gaps are caused by tools focusing on syntax and parsing, and mostly neglecting human factors.[1] I’m not just talking about the fact that languages are clumsy for us to use (more about this later); I’m saying that they ignore our need to talk about important realities of software development: security, coding habits, testability, maintenance plans, dependency management, requirements, intellectual property, and much more.

All this stuff falls within our scope of concern, but none of it is describable in our languages. That’s weird. Imagine we hired a general contractor to build our house, and he was great at swinging hammers and leveling studs. But as soon as we asked him questions about building permits or hiring subs or choosing the right kind of concrete for the foundation, he acted like he didn’t have a clue what we were talking about. We’d be likely to end up with lots of false starts, poorly met requirements, endless kludges, tons of frustration, a heavy QA burden. Hmm… That sounds familiar.

I call this lack of semantic continuity the lacuna humana — the human gap.

The good news is, gaps can often be bridged.

image credit: vestman (Flickr)

I promised I would describe a bridge that has a lot of virtues, and I’m going to begin that work here. It might take us a couple posts to get all the way across, though. Thanks for hanging with me…

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