Not a new drug on the club scene or a state of mind devoutly to be wished for. No, this is an obscure computer language, one of thousands of candidates for inclusion in a proposed museum of software languages.
Why would anyone bother? Because the history of computer languages is the history of our attempts to deal with mechanical intelligence. And if we don鈥檛 collect them now, they鈥檒l crumble away like broken clay tablets from Babylon. We鈥檒l end up with only indecipherable fragments from which to reconstruct our past.
Grady Booch, the man behind the idea and a writer of books about software, says the museum will provide 鈥渢he raw materials for future generations of software archaeologists, historians and software developers鈥�.
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Is this going to be just a vast electronic archive? Not at all. To keep a language alive it has to be used. Computer manuals are always incomplete and often incorrect, so we can鈥檛 rely on them to help. The answer is to write new programs to compile or interpret source code written in old languages so it will run on current computers. It also means maintaining old computers to run the old compilers, so Booch is collaborating with the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, which does just that (New 杏吧原创, 9 February, p40).
Amazingly, there may already be more computer languages than spoken ones. We found more than 2500 languages and dialects at , with even more variety than human tongues. The difference between Pascal and C, say, is as big as that between High German and Californian teenage slang.
We hope there鈥檒l be a twisty little gallery in the museum for truly weird languages. Some are meant to be jokes about America, but actually may reveal as much about people who spend too long in front of computer screens.
Take Valgol. It stands for 鈥淰alley girl鈥� in tribute to Los Angeles suburban teenagers who are notorious for being airheads 鈥� which is why the language contains statements such as 鈥淔OR I = LIKE 1 TO OH*MAYBE 100鈥� (鈥淚, like, maybe鈥� captures how Valley girls speak).
Then there鈥檚 BrainF***, an exercise in euphemism and minimalism. The asterisks in its name tell an obvious story, and while it has just eight one-character commands it is powerful enough to define its own compiler 鈥� in a mere 3162 bytes. Befunge, on the other hand, is the language of total confusion: its programs flow in more than one direction so you can write it but you can鈥檛 read it because you never know where it will go.
To judge from the response to a letter that Booch sent to 500 software fiends proposing the idea, the museum is going to take off. More than 100 are jumping at the chance to get involved.
Any more takers?