Mild colds are their own special annoyance

[jducoeur]

Yesterday, I officially admitted to myself that I have been fighting a cold, probably for the past week and a half. It's been really slight -- just some sinus crap and a constant, moderate, dry cough -- so I haven't felt "sick" per se. But it does get draining after a while.

At this point, the biggest problem is that I'm just plain *tired*, and have the attention span of a particularly dim hamster. This isn't exactly good for my productivity, either for work (either for Artima or Querki) or fun projects.

But in the meantime, for the programmers in the audience (especially anybody into Scala), have a crazy little brainstorm from this morning...

Comments

[metahacker]

Google Translate, but for programming languages.

(Including the part where it kinda sucks at connotation and other higher-level structures...)

[jducoeur]

Kind of. The difference is, I suspect it wouldn't be very hard to make it *correct* -- in the sense of "same input produces same output" -- in the general case. It would start out as "JavaScript in Scala", but I'd probably still rather maintain JS-in-Scala than actual JavaScript in many cases, simply because it's easier to refactor and improve it.

And the fun bit is, once you have "correct", you can gradually evolve the engine towards "good" (or at least, "not so bad"), adding one provably-correct automatic transformation at a time. It's kind of like writing a compiler: "correct" isn't too hard, but "good" usually takes years of evolution.

So it's actually kind of backwards from the human-language case, where it's relatively easy to do something that's superficially *good* in many cases, but frequently comically *wrong*. In human language, "correct" is quite hard.

The analogy's really pretty interesting -- it illustrates the difference between a program (which can be treated somewhat as an I/O blackbox) and human speech (where the "output" is mental transformation in the reader/listener, and the text is relatively whitebox). But I suspect I'm too tired to think about this too deeply...

[keshwyn]

This stupid cold has been resident in our house for over two weeks, and we cannot wait to show it the door. May yours flee the premises much faster than ours is.