> But why isn't it a good idea to start at the assembly level, the natural > language of the machine? High level languages, whether functional or > procedural or what have you are designed for human/programmer > use.
Truly, functional programming languages are NOT designed for human use !! They are designed for mathematical elegance, and not many humans are able to use them... When you strip away the "syntactic sugar" and are just left with the basic apparatus of functional graphs, you have something that is not at all humanly intuitive, but is mathematically very beautiful, giving extremely compact and easily manipulable representations to very complex structured operations. > Wouldn't things be more > simpler if > we understood how to program at the hardware (assembly) level with > self-modifying code? Can anyone recommend some good books? I feel that this apparent simplicity is deceptive. Yeah, it's simple to write a parser for assembler. But, in practice, the task of learning to do anything mentally meaningful in assembler is unnecessarily hard, because mentally meaningful programs in assembler are very very very long and tangled. Atoms are simpler than molecules and cells too, but that doesn't mean it's easier to learn to rewire brains for greater intelligence by starting from atoms than by starting from molecules or cells.... Even though, yeah, understanding atoms in general implies an understanding of molecules and cells. Intuitively, I think of the "mental utility" of a programming language as involving the percentage of programs of small size that are mentally meaningful, and the percentage of natural program transformations that preserve mental meaningfulness. I believe that the mental utility of assembler programs is WAY less than that of functional programs, on average. And the Sasha language, the functional language we'll use for Novamente self-modification, is specifically designed for mental utility... Similarly, the percentage of configurations of neurons that have mental utility is greater by far than the percentage of configurations of atoms that have mental utility... -- Ben G ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?[EMAIL PROTECTED]
