Languaging

Bill de hÓra writes...

You can think of it this way - if Lisp and Smalltalk represent some kind of maxima for expressivity in programming languages then speech act languages like KIF and FIPA-ACL represent a maxima for expressivity in Internet application protocols.

I guess I'll have to figure out what those are.

Enough research and experimentation has been conducted on software agent communication languages over the last twenty years to gives us an inkling of how this might work. The primary problem with this option is social - my guess is that it's more difficult to innovate with application protocols than content models since app protocols tend to be baked into the infrastructure as of the beginning of the 21st Century. And we do tend to think of protocols in engineering terms (interfaces, structures. bits, wires) rather than as linguistic phenomena. It's not called the Internet Language Task Force after all.

Hmm. Interesting. I've been of the mind that there are a small number of application protocols and then another level of protocols could evolve as sequences. (Kind of using DNA bases and sequences as metaphors.) So we need a basic technical structure that will enable a socially acceptable process for evolution.