[HN Gopher] Cree#, a morphemic programming language with Cree ke...
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Cree#, a morphemic programming language with Cree keywords and
concepts
Author : relatt
Score : 51 points
Date : 2021-04-11 16:13 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (esoteric.codes)
(TXT) w3m dump (esoteric.codes)
| smitty1e wrote:
| > Jon Corbett
|
| Not to be confused with Jonathan Corbet of LWN.
| saltyfamiliar wrote:
| This feels vaguely racist. It's one thing to make a programming
| language that uses Cree keywords, but to include smoke signals,
| call loops "winters" and make it all about "storytelling" just
| seems so patronizing.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads into flamewar.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| sterlind wrote:
| The creator is Cree himself [0].
|
| I think the storytelling aspect is what he's going for, not
| just to make C# but with Cree keywords. Baskets are weaved
| differently in different cultures. Is it possible to have a
| programming language that reflects a different culture or
| outlook? What would that look like? It's an experiment.
|
| 0. http://joncorbett.ca/default.html
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Don't let past misuses of Cree culture by outsiders restrict
| their ability to use those paradigms as they see fit. Just
| because someone in Hollywood thought that smoke signals made a
| good trope for any movie involving first nations doesn't mean
| that smoke signals are inherently racist or offensive when used
| in an appropriate context.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I read the whole interview, and at no point did I really feel
| like I understood what this is trying to achieve. The closest I
| felt I got was this:
|
| --- > Obviously my primary target communities here are Cree
| communities that are looking for new (and exciting) ways to
| encourage students (especially in the K-12 grades) to use their
| heritage language as much as possible, and resist using English
| as their primary language. ---
|
| But at the end of the day - This feels more like a display piece
| along the lines of art. Choices were personal, artistic, and
| spiritual. But I _REALLY_ struggle to call this a programming
| language. To quote him:
|
| --- > Where the output is generative and graphic. The generative
| aspect is crucial in the representation of the Indigenous
| worldview, because when the program ends whatever display was
| generated is destroyed (comes to end of life). And subsequent
| running of the program - though they may produce similar results
| will never be graphically identical to any previous execution.
| This mimics the "real" world equivalent of listening to a story
| from a storyteller - who might change it slightly each time, so
| the same story is never the same twice. ---
|
| I'd say instead this feels more like NetLogo - It's a modeling
| environment that creates generative graphical output based on
| input, but is not capable of doing most of the things that I'd
| expect from any real programming language. Mainly - repeatability
| and precision.
|
| Doesn't make it a bad choice, particularly if his goal is student
| engagement - but it's not a tool that I feel has much use outside
| of the very limited environment of teaching/story telling.
| relatt wrote:
| Yes I think it's both those things, and really a few different
| projects with overlapping goals:
|
| Cree# itself as a general-purpose language based on C#/Java
| with Cree keywords
|
| Ancestral Codes and wisakecak as multimedia versions of the
| language, what he calls the "digital storytelling apparatus."
| Here he's bringing in cultural logic from Cree, with programs
| as stories written to the Raven, as interpreter of the code,
| used to record and present stories from Cree elders, etc
|
| And then the Indigenous Toolkit to help other communities build
| programming languages around their own traditions
| jdc wrote:
| > Doesn't make it a bad choice, particularly if his goal is
| student engagement - but it's not a tool that I feel has much
| use outside of the very limited environment of teaching/story
| telling.
|
| And that's enough.
| ModernMech wrote:
| I encourage you to watch this talk by Amy J. Ko called A Human
| View of Programming she gave at SPLASHCon a couple years ago
| [0]. It makes that case that the predominant view of
| programming languages as math or tools is not the only valid
| view, and that by holding this narrow definition for
| programming languages, the PL community has left a huge design
| space untapped.
|
| I think it's fine for you to expect repeatability and precision
| from the languages you use if you are using them as tools. But
| not everyone uses programming languages that way, so I don't
| think a PL that is not repeatable and precise is any less of a
| programming language. It may not be a good tool, but as the
| talk argues, that's okay, as this is only one a narrow view of
| programming languages.
|
| https://medium.com/bits-and-behavior/my-splash-2016-keynote-...
| api wrote:
| I can imagine another timeline where the settlement of the
| Americas was more a blending than a displacement and there exist
| things like Cherokee and Navajo keyboards.
| philwelch wrote:
| The cultural devastation wrought on the indigenous peoples of
| the Americas was tragic. But it was also largely inevitable.
| The colonization of Africa left many more Africans alive than
| the colonization of America because America was biologically
| isolated from Eurasia while Africa was not. The epidemics,
| particularly of smallpox, that depopulated the Americas were so
| brutal largely because the indigenous Americans had neither the
| biological nor the cultural adaptation to infectious disease
| that was common among Eurasians and Africans. Most indigenous
| causes of illness in the Americas were due to parasites rather
| than viruses and bacteria, allowing the evolution of cultural
| practices like having the entire extended family of a sick
| person keep them company and try and comfort them through their
| illness.
|
| One consequence of this is that the indigenous cultures that
| we've actually had the chance to study don't really represent
| the pre-Colombian cultures that well, because by then, there
| was already substantial disruption from the infectious diseases
| and wildlife that spread throughout the continent well in
| advance of explorers and colonists.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| This narrative gets trotted out anytime this subject comes
| up. It's not reflective of the actual literature. Here's an
| older perspective from 2009 [1]:
|
| > the available evidence clearly indicates that the
| demographic collapse was not uniform in either timing or
| magnitude and may have been caused by factors other than
| epidemic disease. ... Despite the trauma of conquest, Native
| Americans continued to have their own histories, intertwined
| with but not entirely determined by Europeans and their
| pathogens.
|
| Since that was written, the evidence has swung even more
| strongly towards the idea that disease was intimately
| associated with the close, persistent contacts needed for the
| "conquest" and missionary activities of colonial powers.
|
| Not to mention, similar epidemics were observed among
| indigenous southern africans and siberians during their
| respective colonizations. The Americas were unique in the
| scale and completeness of their disruption, but not in the
| mechanisms.
|
| [1] https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-009-9036-8
| jariel wrote:
| This is a wayward argument.
|
| You're arguing from the quote that 'it's other than
| disease' and then two sentences later that it was, but due
| to 'persistent contact needed for conquest'.
|
| None of this adds up to a coherent argument.
|
| If Aboriginals weren't dying en mass from disease, then
| what from? Because we have crude records of interaction.
| There were very few violent fights between Aboriginals and
| newcomers in Canada, for example.
|
| And where is the evidence that Colonialists had
| 'consistent, closer contact' in hew New World, than in
| Africa?
|
| I'm all for more nuanced history, we're learning stuff
| every day, but I think a lot of it is also speculative, and
| ideologically driven.
| Grieving wrote:
| I agree largely with your response, but
|
| > And where is the evidence that Colonialists had
| 'consistent, closer contact' in hew New World, than in
| Africa?
|
| In Africa, Europeans died off rapidly due to local
| diseases. Consequently, the early slave trade was
| centered in the islands off of Africa itself, and
| mediated by a mulatto class who were less susceptible.
| jariel wrote:
| Aboriginals had no writing system so there would be no
| keyboards.
|
| That should be a signal as to how 'far apart' colonialists and
| aboriginals were with respect to development of cultural
| institutions.
|
| The writing you see in this post is invented by a Canadian-
| English Methodist Priest in the mid 10th (Edit: 19th century
| obviously!) century for the benefit of the aboriginals. The
| system, in current terms is itself 'firmly colonialist' (I'm
| sure someone will cynically characterize it as a form of
| oppression).
|
| That said, it'd be cool to see Cree keyboards.
|
| In fact, making a 'Cree Keyboard' might have been a much more
| practical use of the authors time, and might have actually more
| materially affected young people's ability to learn Cree.
|
| Come to think of it, there really should be such keyboards
| available ...
| quiescant_dodo wrote:
| > Aboriginals had no writing system so there would be no
| keyboards.
|
| The Maya and Aztec had writing in the form of hieroglypics.
| The Inca had persistent communication via Quipu's rope knots.
|
| (I learned this from _Guns, Germs, and Steel_ which is a
| phenomenal book. I haven't done other research, though, so
| maybe the book isn't a good source.)
| Grieving wrote:
| I assume the person you're responding to is talking more
| about the aboriginal peoples of the United States.
|
| GG&S is an interesting book, but extremely conjectural and
| ideological, and not well-sourced. Some of the evidence is
| distorted. Off the top of my head, he reproduces a table of
| grain yields, and when tracking down his sources for this,
| it turns out that he's omitted results that contradict his
| theory. The reasoning is sometimes shaky or circular: 'Why
| do we know X wasn't domesticable? Because it wasn't
| domesticated.' Etc. etc. I don't find his theory holds up
| particularly well.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Charles Mann's 1492 is a better book than Guns, Germs, and
| Steel for anything pre-Columbian Americas.
|
| The Mayans had a complete, complex logosyllabic writing
| system. (I believe the syllabic components are more common
| than logographic components, but I'm not certain).
| Individual syllables (or logograms) could be combined into
| a single glyph block in a variety of ways. This writing
| system, I believe, is connected to Zapotec and epi-Olmec
| writing systems, but disentangling who created what and who
| borrowed from whom in Mesoamerica is challenging.
|
| The Aztecs had what appears to be a proto-writing system,
| largely capable of only recording proper nouns
| (predominantly place names); most of the writing would
| instead be conveyed pictographically. Before the Aztecs, in
| Classical Mesoamerica, Teotihuacan (which was the major
| power in the Central Mexico Valley at that time period)
| appears to have never used any form of writing, despite
| having conquered Classic Maya city-states which were in
| full florescence of their writing systems.
|
| Quipus originate at least as early as the Wari culture in
| the Andes, although (again) people only recognize the final
| Andean civilization, the Inca. Whether or not they are a
| writing system is debatable--it's known they encode more
| than just numeric values (such as place names), but whether
| they can convey enough information to be considered writing
| is unknown.
|
| Post-contact, Sequoya developed a syllabary for the
| Cherokee language based only on the knowledge of the
| existence of the Latin alphabet (he couldn't read English
| or any European language, but he did have access to
| European-language materials--that's why several Cherokee
| letterforms look like Latin ones but have _completely_
| different meanings). Missionaries in Canada developed a
| syllabary for several aboriginal languages that remains in
| use by many Cree, Ojibwe, and Inuktitut speakers.
| grzm wrote:
| Thanks for the reference. Sounds like an interesting
| book! I see Charles Mann has a couple of books. Have you
| read _1493_ also?
|
| - _1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus_
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39020.1491
|
| - _1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created_
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9862761-1493
| jcranmer wrote:
| It's on my to-read list, but I haven't made time for it
| yet.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Or, more plausibly, these societies without writing systems
| might have developed their own writing systems eventually.
|
| Your post could be applied to the Vietnamese writing system,
| for example. Or to the many other languages that have adopted
| variants of the Arabic, Cyrillic, and Latin writing systems.
|
| No society is frozen in time.
| jariel wrote:
| That they 'would have, maybe in 1000 years developed a
| writing system' is definitely true, but the fact is at
| contact they did not, and even after 100's of years of
| trade and interaction and availability of Western
| literature - they still did not, and so that they did not
| is a meaningful measure of cultural evolution.
|
| It's hard to do most advanced things without writing if you
| only have oral, just like it's hard to do some things
| without Iron if you only have Bronze.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Aboriginals had no writing system so there would be no
| keyboards.
|
| Mesoamerica had at least one family of complete writing
| systems (I'll call this Maya, although whether or not they
| invented it or adapted it from others is debated), and
| another proto-writing system that may well evolved into a
| full writing system (the Aztecs, who at the time of contact
| appear to have been in the early stages of planning a
| conquest of the Maya). Andean cultures had a maybe-it's-a-
| writing-system-unlike-any-other, the quipus.
|
| Of course, positing a less domineering conquest, it is very
| likely that cultures may well have developed their own
| indigenous writing systems via contact with Europeans--that
| is _precisely_ what the Cherokee did. I doubt they would have
| stubbornly refused to pick up any writing systems.
|
| > That should be a signal as to how 'far apart' colonialists
| and aboriginals were with respect to development of cultural
| institutions.
|
| Yeah, Tenochtitlan had public zoos and museums, organized
| anthropology, universal primary education, ethnic quarters,
| professional sports leagues at a time when all of those
| concepts would take another few centuries to be 'invented' in
| Europe.
|
| Oh, wait, were you suggesting that it was _the Americas_ that
| was culturally backward?
|
| > The writing you see in this post is invented by a Canadian-
| English Methodist Priest in the mid 10th century for the
| benefit of the aboriginals. The system, in current terms is
| itself 'firmly colonialist' (I'm sure someone will cynically
| characterize it as a form of oppression).
|
| My understanding is that the modern indigenous groups see the
| use of the syllabics as less oppressive than being forced to
| use Latin, as the syllabics are designed to more closely
| match the language than using the Latin script.
| craigbaker wrote:
| Both keyboards do exist. The Cherokee layout is included in OSX
| and iOS, while Navajo is available for download. You can find
| pictures of Cherokee keycaps in use, and I think there were
| also typewriters and certainly printed type in Cherokee.
| Grieving wrote:
| That blending largely occurred in Latin America, but languages
| rarely survive such things both in the Americas and generally
| throughout history. Communication is important enough that the
| language of whichever group is technologically superior becomes
| the lingua franca, and the other slowly disappears.
| samatman wrote:
| That undersells the situation in Latin America, to put it
| mildly. There are almost two million native speakers of
| Nahuatl languages in Mexico, six million Maya speakers in
| Central America, 25% of Peru speaks Quechua at home (around
| ten million in total throughout the Andes). Guarani has
| official status in Paraguay, half of the population is
| monolingual in it, substantial numbers of people of partial
| or complete European ancestry speak it every day, we're
| talking about 6.5 million people.
|
| As a point of comparison, there are 2.9 million registered
| Native Americans, and 5.2 million people who check that box,
| sometimes along with others, on the latest census.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| That the keywords and symbols are Cree is trivial and not that
| much different than when someone does the same thing with Klingon
| or Swedish Chef but the concept of a programming language based
| on storytelling is interesting. It might never end up being a
| useful language for information infrastructure or corporate
| problem solving but I suspect that if it gains much traction with
| Cree students (or anyone with an interest) that they'll end up
| coming up with uses that we haven't thought of before with our
| programming languages tied so deeply to our cultural norms.
| na85 wrote:
| >with our programming languages tied so deeply to our cultural
| norms.
|
| In what way do you perceive mainstream programming languages to
| be tied to cultural norms?
| thechao wrote:
| A colleague is French-Canadian; I suggested localizing C to
| French; he proposed: le if (...) { }
| c'est la vie { }
| nerdponx wrote:
| Is it? The language appears to (at least somewhat) make use of
| syntax that is inspired by the specific way the Cree language
| works.
| chickenmonkey wrote:
| I see this as an attempt to implement a programming paradigm (i.e
| storytelling) that's radically different from existing paradigms.
| How are others interpreting this project? What's it's
| significance?
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