At the Beginning there was the Word
At the beginning there was the word and languages formed around those words and the mind got a tool to apprehend logical coherences. The apple of perception?
Language And Consciousness
With the help of the languages and it's intrinsic grammar a logical image of the reality, conveyed by our sences, arises in our mind. This allows us to understand things, to evaluate events and to act anticipatory.
Language and Reality
Languages are an interesting topic. Everything seems to have its own language. The DNS
defines the biological life, the mathematics describes physical events and our
human languages gives us allmost magical powers.
As far as I understand, I do think in words, in sentences, within a model, given by my
senses, as well as by the intrinsic logic of the language in which I choose to think.
Every language has its own definitions, rules and areas, where it can be usefull.
Think of boolean logik, the foundation of the information age.
Boolean logik is actualy very simple. You have a few definitions, operators and many objects on which
the definitions and their combinations are applied. One advantage of this language is, that,
as long as the model is valid, events are predictable, as well as comprehensible.
More about boolean algebra.
Boolean Algebra: Belief it or not, boolean algebra is the foundation of the information age Actually it quite simple. One makes statements, evaluates their truth and then applies logical operations to combinations of them. Definitions (Statements): freedom is good, war is bad, ... Logical operators: and, or not Objects: freedom, joy, pancake, war, whatever... Proof of Truth of a Statements: The truth of a statement is often sensed relative, because it it depends also of the point of view. Eating pork might be good for you, but is definetly bad for the pig. However there are things on which everbody can agree to. Water is wet, indeed. Having defined the truth of several statements, one can come to new conclusions. Operations on Statements:
freedom is good = yes freedom is not good = no (freedom is good) und (war ist bad) = yes and yes = yes (freedom is not good) und (war is bad) = no and yes = no (freedom is good) oder (war is not bad) = yes or no = yes
Rules: With rules one can describe conditional issues, like e.g.: if something has wheels, it is most probably not my grandma. Binary Model on Base of Boolean Logic: So, with boolean algebra you can compute, link combinations, define rules and control the course of events. In other words, you can build computer.
Languages are powerful tools of the mind, that can make us independant of feelings and believes, as long as they are understood and applied correctly. This might be a pitfall, because knowledge can be used for good, as well as for bad things.
Natural Language and Logic
Naturaly it is not that easy in reality. Every language implies a certain model with ambit and limitations. The other way round it means that, if a model represents a peace of realty correct, then you can rely on that model. Electro technique is a good example. Mostly failures can be traced back to wrong application of the model's philosophy. If a sience is right and if it is applied correctly, it leads to the desired results.
Scripture, Mathematik and Software
Scripture is an important, if not the most important tool of all sciences.
By reading books we can learn, understand und judge. With software we control
computer and networks, By the way, higher computer languages are not so different
to human languages, as one might think at first.
More about computer languages.
On the basis of binary logic many computer languages have been developed. First
there was assambler, that maps zeros and ones to a more human readable code.
Then so called higher languages have been developed like PASCAL (Klaus Wirth) and
of course C, the language in which UNIX is written.
The developer of C, Carnigham und Richie did later say that they finnished the
development of C, when succeeding to write completly unreadable code.
However C is efficient and qualified for the programming of operation systems.
Scripting languages like PERL und its offsprings simplifies programm significantly,
by hidding details and are especialy the best for text processing purposes.
For me PERL is a big liberation, one can almost script faster, then one can
speak. For amusement of the non programmer, here a language that is called
'Regular Expressions'. Regular Expressions a tool to search and manipulate
character string.
my $String =~ s/^([^ ]*) *([^ ]*)/$2 $1/;
Looks unreadaby? It is not, if you can think in regular expressions. This statement
simply swaps the first two words. With 'my' a local variable named '$String' is defined.
'=~' is the match operator, which looks up, if the right expression is found in
the left. 's/match/sustitution/' substitutes in '$String' match against sustitution.
'^' points to the beginning of a string. '()' gives you a reference to $1.
'([^ ]*)' are all character besides blank, usw...
Try this tiny perl script:
perl -e '{$s = "word to swap"; $s =~ s/^([^ ]*) *([^ ]*)/$2 $1/; print $s;}'
This example shows, how much the syntax does influens the diction and even the way
of thinking. A very important part of a programming language is its syntax.
The more restrictive, the higher is the programing effort for a modul. If many
people are working together, this can be an advantage, especially if interface
managment gets into the foreground.
Every language is based on definitions and Facts, has a syntax and a semantic and is emmbeded in a special context. In the age of digital networking, text processing and especially 'Markup' languages are of of great interest.
World Wide Web
The WWW is an application on the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), which in turn was wisely integrated in the UNIX operating system, from the very beginning. The necessary tasks to implement the functionality for communication between computers are defined by the ISO layer model. On the applications programming layer programms can connect to each other via so called sockets. Sockets works similar to 'pipes'. With 'pipes' you can write the output of one progam to the input of another. Sockets extends this feature by network capabilities. The idea is that a browser (client) requests data from remote servers and dislays them in a user friendly manner. Funnyly, at first the WWW was not developed by the software industry, but at the CERN, by physisists like Tim Berners Lee, who needed a tools to easily exchange their documents.
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)
The term 'Markup' was originaly used by the printing industry. A markup was a description, how a docoument should be printed. HTML, more genarally ML adds the possibilites to mark up also information about content and its context, as well as hyperlinks. Notice that HTML is a document description language, not a programming language. But borders are not that exact, especially if text is generated dynamicaly 'on the fly' on the server or client side.
Hypertext Transfer Protokol
The Hypertext Transfer Protokol defines the exchange of HTML Documents between an HTTP Daemon (server) and a receiver browser (client). Client/Server Programming can be quite tricky, because you don't have a single, sequential program, but requests and responses exchanged between client and server. If both, clients and servers, are running on both sides, we speak of peer to peer networking.
Database and SQL
Databases are the foundation of electronic business and trade. There
exists object oriented and rational databases. A rational database
is actually quite easy to understand. Data are ordered in tables
and can be queried with the 'Structured Query Language'.
More about databases.
Rational Databases:
Databases tables consist of rows and columns, thus bilding cells.
These cells can be addressed e..g. by their row and column numbers. A SQL query
looks for example like:
select name, password from user_table where name = 'Paul';
This statement selects 'name' und 'passwort' from all rows, which columns contains the name Paul,
Information, Communication und Internet
Communication enables individuals to work together and to pursue a common target. The internet has magnified the informaion and communication possabilies, signifantly. Instead of going to a library, Information are available 'at our finger tip'. And we easily can connect to people we don't know personaly. At first this sounds really promising, but introduces also great dangers. Don't forget that the internet was developed by the DOD.
Connecting People and Building Platfoms
The described technologies opens up a whole new world of possibilitiess, but also
raises questions, that should be answered. Is this development leading to a world
in which people can freely communicate with each other to exchange knowledge and
experience, or are we heading into a 'big brother' society without privacy?
The great challenge will be to utilize these technologies in a way,
so that we all can benefit from them.