masak
React in some way to Eidola, a language
This is very late to the party, but I'd rather have an issue about this, and try to extract what I can.
- https://web.archive.org/web/20071212190058/http://eidola.org/ "Eidola"
The project/language was active in 2001 and 2002. Its goals are evident in the first paragraph:
Eidola is a representation-independent, object-oriented, visual programming language.
The name Eidola is the plural of Ancient Greek eídōlon (εἴδωλον) meaning [figure, representation](figure, representation); same root as in "eidetic memory".
Traditional programming languages are heavily tied to their representation as textual source code, which is unfortunate -- pure text is a very poor notation system for the concepts of a high-level language. An Eidola program, however, exists independent of any representation; its "fundamental" form is as a set of carefully defined mathematical abstractions, opening the possibility of having many different notations.
This goal, needless to say, is very ambitious. When I learned about this effort back in the day, I was mighty impressed, thinking that this is obviously a Good Thing to do. Representation-independent programs! In the intervening time I've perhaps gotten a bit more, I dunno, jaded or cautious or something. I still think it's a neat idea, but I'm highly aware that syntax (as base and worldly of a notion as it is) manages to ground semantics in something concrete and irrefutable. Some part of me wonders if you can even be notation-independent — or if, perhaps, the closest you can get is something like allowing several parallel notations/syntaxes, neither of them declared primary or canonical, and with the ability to freely translate between them. In that case, nothing ties you down to a particular syntax, but you're not completely rid of syntax either.
What else? Oh, I remember the page about music notation was quite good. The idea that music notation has evolved over the centuries to be a really good fit for the human eye and to, in some sense, make good use of the ink and the page to express a lot with a little.
This issue can be closed after I've looked through the resources on that page and written up a review/postmortem of them.
