mosqutopi

I find it surprising that a bot can create such a post!, anyway I use to change password randomly to create new account in HN, it seems a downvote move me to change my nick and start anew. Anyway I find the post of math and programming very interesting but you can always get better.

A very quick glimpse, seconds, at your create-scala book and it there are a lot of figures like in the logo turtle language

I read scala for the impatience, but once you know clojure, haskell, erlang and other languages the scala language seems to be one more language, a better java but nothing that really surprise you. I know that using scala you can make your programs very difficult to read using obscure notations for operators. I like to use scala as a repl for exploring java classes, a little more useful that clojure in this regard.

Very long time ago I was trying to program many matroids algorithms, let's say that matroids are a generalization of vector spaces and independence, in prolog. I could program those algorithm in many languages, for example in Lisp, but programming in Prolog was very painful. I think that prolog related programming is a useful tool when the program is similar to those solved by forward chaining but in other cases I can't not see the benefits, the dismissal of Prolog in day to day programming seems to reflect that sentiment.

Perhaps we should first try to understand dolphin's language. Another suggestion for aliens to understand our language would be first to show then how evolution in earth has happened. Any high technology creature able to travel across the universe must have been studying some kind of evolutionary path. Perhaps studying the neurons they could infer a lot of information about how our mind interacts with the environment.

Edited: An interesting novel is The Black Cloud by Hoyle in which the author tries to establish a language between human and an intelligent extraterrestrial electromagnetic cloud.