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#thinking-together
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# thinking-together
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Eli Mellen

04/12/2023, 10:50 PM
I’ll be leaning a discussion at my work about Elephant 2000 soon, and found this very valuable context to help ground the paper in some common, yet not clearly defined terms. Anyone have thoughts on Elephant 2000?
big shout out to the paper for using the term “Algolic” to refer to languages related to ALGOL.
I think I’m specifically interested in trying to draw out connections between Elephant 2000 and theory making.
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Andrew F

04/13/2023, 2:29 AM
Never heard of it before, or wasn't ready to take it seriously. It looks neat. I don't suppose there's a prototype interpreter out there? And yes, "Algolic" is fun. :D
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Eli Mellen

04/13/2023, 10:50 AM
I’m not aware of any implementations of Elephant 2000, but re-reading it last night I was struck by some similarities between Elephant 2000 and INFORM.
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Jimmy Miller

04/13/2023, 2:29 PM
Huge fan of Elephant 2000. It shows just how far we still have in expanding the linguistic side of programming. I don't think anyone has implemented it, but I think you can see the influence in Dynamicland's RealTalk. Its keywords Wish and Claim are both speech acts. The fact that dynamic land has effects in the actual world through its words makes this fact seem to be far from a coincidence. Sadly, Elephant 2000 isn't in Bret's list of papers, so I can't be certain he has read it, but I'd be surprised to find out this is an accident. Definitely recommend reading Searle or Austin on speech acts. Searle is definitely less jargon heavy and incredibly readable.
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Eli Mellen

04/13/2023, 2:34 PM
Potentially because I’m especially and acutely APL-pilled at the moment, I was struck by sort of sneaky connections between speech acts and APL’s. While the glyphs aren’t really “readable” as text, they are readable, e.g. “union without intersection” does just that
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João Araújo

04/22/2023, 2:56 PM
they’re readable as text, just as a different script, like Chinese is readable you just need to learn the script!
@Jimmy Miller btw, do you know if RealTalk is Open Source or if there’s at least some kind of reference somewhere?
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Jimmy Miller

04/22/2023, 3:24 PM
It’s not open source sadly. I think this is the best post describing it https://omar.website/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/
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João Araújo

04/22/2023, 4:30 PM
got it, thanks
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