Thursday, March 8, 2012

Event structure and programming languages

So here's an idea I'm working on: that a programming language based on event structure---more precisely, the linguistic/cognitive representational model thereof---will be intuitive and easy for a wide range of programmers to use.   Now breaking down events into sub-events has long been a fundamental task for much of programming.  To say the least.  The advantage of basing yet another such system on natural language/cognition is that it should align our computational breakdowns of event structures (i.e. chiefly as instructions on sub-events to execute) how we naturally perceive them. This alignment isn't always super-obvious, since languages tend to lump some sub-events together into chunks while parsing others out (see the work of Leonard Talmy for lots on this, and I may revise with examples therefrom).  But these kinds of analyses of the sub-elements of event structure are in my experience quite easy to learn---perhaps since they simply aim to reflect the cognitive structuring what we all already implicitly know. More on this later.

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