Anupam 《ミ》λ≡ on Nostr: Names are words. Why not phrases? When communicating with others using natural ...

Names are words. Why not phrases? When communicating with others using natural language, we don't give names to every concept, but we instead generate phrases and sentences on the fly. Programming, should be like natural language, composed of a smaller number of primitives that can be combined in many ways without having to create pointers to parts of the structure. In the existing programming languages yes you need to depend on descriptive names, but the ideal programming language would be expressive enough to not require it. Where you can read a "paragraph" of code in one go and understand it perfectly, without jumping around, without thinking about its dependencies to anywhere else in the code.

We can do that in English. I can say "and at those words, it was done". There are lots of things left unspecified, but you understand the meaning of this phrase perfectly without having to name what "those words" are, or what was done, or by whom. Without knowing any context at all, you can manipulate the logic, for example to negate the meaning and say "and even at those words, it was not done". It feels natural, and I feel that this is easier for the human mind to understand and manipulate than a scheme with a lot of names and pointers to other things. I'm imagining lawyer speak - "and when the party of the first part, said the words as described in paragraph 24 of the preceding section, the work as described in the contract signed between the aforementioned parties was completed by the party of the second part".