Update on Esopo

Last Wednesday, I had the opportunity to drop in on John Cayley’s digital language arts workshop at Brown University for a wonderful discussion on language, translatability, and the promise/perils of natural language processing. I won’t try to summarise everything that was discussed here, but it is always interesting to hear (particularly digital) writers bring up their obsessions and anxieties around the nature of language itself.

Part of our discussion focused on a subject near and dear to my heart: to what extent programming languages can or should be considered “language” in the same sense as “natural language.” The students in the workshop raised a number of issues relevant to that question including:

1. The possibility of perfect translatability (e.g. through reduction to lambda calculus) of programming languages vs. the inherent (and ethically-charged) problems of natural language translation
2. The possible non-equivalency of available expression in natural languages vs. the provable equivalency of Turing complete programming languages ¹
3. Issues of culture surrounding programming and natural languages

I’ll save a complete rundown of my own opinions on these issues for longer treatment, but this discussion did prompt me to share my work on the Esopo project with the group. And that in turn, prompted me to get off my butt and finish up one of the Javascript interpreters I’ve long promised for that project.

The interpreter (available here) is for AshPaper, one of my earliest (though not necessarily one of my favorite) Esopo languages. If you check out the link, you’ll be able to play around with AshPaper a little bit and try creating (and executing) your own AshPaper poems/programs. The interpreter is not quite complete (it does not yet handle end-rhyme at all, and it has trouble with trickier syllable counts), but there’s definitely enough there to have fun with. Have a poke at it, and let me know what you think (Twitter link)! If you want detailed information on how to write in AshPaper, check out the details of the language here, but I’d also be curious to hear what people figure out with it just by playing with the interpreter.

Footnotes