The book is called The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman, and it's an excellent read.

Briefly, for the interested Slashdotter, he outlines five different ways people try to communicate affection -- words of affirmation, quality time, gift-giving, acts of servitude, and physical contact -- and then says that not "speaking" your partner's love language can cause a whole lot of strife because not only can you not communicate your affection, you can't understand when they're communicating theirs.

Thanks for mentioning it.

Isn't that the point? Why are we building these machines anyways if not to make our lives simpler and easier, and what is easier than giving instructions to something in one's own tongue?

I'm actually not certain it'll be a natural human language, though. I mean, perhaps in the really long term it might be, but in the shorter-long-term (uh... say, 1,000 years out?) programming languages -- and I'd be willing to bet there won't be one language, but many, and with just as many dialects, and the machines will understand all of them -- will at least resemble the languages we have now, if only because that's their heritage. In the same way that Spanish and Italian and, to an extent English, all resemble Latin, these future computer languages are going to resemble their parent tongues.

You're right, though. The distinction between "programmer" and "commander" is going to gradually fade. I'm ok with that, though; all that means is that I get to put "Commander" on my business card instead of "Programmer." Sounds much cooler, don't you think? ;-)

As for comparing actual semantic differences vs. syntactic differences, well, I imagine it's really damn difficult, considering the syntactical construction of an expression determines its semantics. In other words, if you change the syntax, you've likely changed the semantics, at least at a low level.

I know what you're trying to say, though. I'm reminded of an exercise given to me in my intro to CS class. We have to convert a for loop to a while loop to do-while loop and back again. Syntactically, they're all different, but semantically, at least for that exercise, they all did the same thing. You'd like a language or an IDE or whatever that can tell you that those three loops are all doing the same thing, regardless of how I write them, and frankly, I think such a language/IDE/magic wand would be freakin' fantastic. (I mean, consider for a moment how often you've rewritten something and are certain it does the exact same thing as the previous incarnation and are shocked when you realize it doesn't?) I'm just not certain if you can achieve that with any ease at all. You'd essentially have to have code that understood any other code, which sounds remarkably similar to the halting problem.

There may be specific cases where this is doable, though... I can see a language like Haskell being able to provide this sort of analysis for loops or a few simple function calls or whatnot. The reason I pick Haskell is because it's, in general, a language free of side effects, which aspect of programming could increase the complexity of any compile-time semantic analysis by orders of magnitude. Runtime analysis is a different story, of course... but, again, that treads awfully close to no-general-purpose-solution worlds here.

I'm actually not sure about this. We may not need middle-men for distribution anymore, but we may need them to separate the wheat from the chaff. The problem I foresee with direct distribution is that there's no easy way to know what's good or bad out there (where "good" and "bad" are, of course, defined by one's personal tastes). There's value in being able to say to a consumer "hey, you liked artist X a lot, why not try artist Y?", which function, among others, I think "middle-men" could perform admirably.

To use your albeit cliched (and ill-fiitting; you're comparing about a business model to a product; the product hasn't really changed, but the business model certainly will) analogy, it may force the "middle-men" (RIAA etc. here) to change from being buggy accessory manufacturers to information clearinghouses about "buggies" and their various capabilities and relationships. A sort of edmunds.com for music, if you will. There's still a role to be played at that level, but it's no longer the one of art distributor.

Oh, I'm sure they do...

Looks like we just found one, so I'd say yes!

I'm impressed you know about the two languages, though. Very cool.

You were doing great up until this point, friend. You make it sound like Uthman moved unilaterally and without consulting anyone, whereas nothing could be further from the truth. Even before Uthman, in the time of Abu Bakr's caliphate, there were complete copies of the Qur'an. The order of the chapters, however, differed from copy to copy. What Uthman did was gather those who'd learned the Qur'an from the Prophet himself into a committee and ask them to come up with a standardized order. The committee consulted with other people who'd memorized the Qur'an, as well as with other copies of the text, to make sure there was no discrepancy, and then created the authoritative text of the Qur'an.

You'll note that unlike the Bible, there are no alternate versions or editions of the Qur'an, and no amount of research has produced noteworthy differences between copies. In fact, most scholars, western and eastern, believe that the Qur'an contains the exact words as spoken by the Prophet with little variation at all. I doubt the same can be said for the Bible.

That's like saying "There's nothing wrong fundamentally wrong with Communism (or Monarchies, or Feudalism...) if done properly.
The problem is, who gets to define "proper?" Who gets to define what traits are acceptable, desirable, or even proper? You? "The Party?" The Societal Superstructure? What's ironic is that you mention that in the past it's been driven by arbitrary criteria, among which you include eye color, which is one of the very traits one can select.

No, my friend. Eugenics is dangerous territory for a whole truckload of reasons, not the least of which is that we run the risk of driving human genetic selection based on the arbitrary criteria you mentioned. The repercussions are not just that everyone will look the same or similar; it's quite likely that it will generate more powerful waves of discrimination ala Gattaca, and maybe even more so. I can imagine a eugenics-implementing society eventually devolving into a caste system very easily and very quickly.

(On the other hand, a controlled breeding program might be a good thing... Kwisatz Haderach, anyone? *grin*. /sarcasm)

San Francisco's a pretty good example of this. Most of the lights in the city point downwards and seem not to destroy my night vision too badly. As a result, a lot of the constellations are visible from rooftops etc and are actually pretty easy to pick out. Contrast this with Atlanta, for example, where the light from the BoA building alone (not to mention the building itself...) blocks out half the night's sky.

I do wish more city planners would take proper lighting into consideration.

Here here.

In Saudi Arabia, I went with the Boy Scouts once to catch the Leonid meteor shower out in the desert, about two hundred miles away from anyone but the bedouins. Out there, it's just the sky, the sand, and you... and dozens of falling stars like tears from the cosmos. Truly awe inspiring. I think we said maybe four words to each other the entire time.

Sounds like Smalltalk or Squeak. The IDE is the language. Need to perform memory analysis? aClass allInstances. Want to see how many references there are to a given object? anObject allInstances. And I love being able to inspect an object, step through code, and see my inspected object change with the code. The whole language was such a completely different development paradigm that even now, some 30 years after its invention, I'm still marveling at it.

Going back from Smalltalk and Squeak to working in Java and C++ with XCode and Emacs was like stepping out of heaven (debugging pun most certainly intended) and into a trash heap, strange runtime issues notwithstanding. Sounds like I'll have to give SLIME a go.