Work In Progress

Computer languages are very precise because they are designed to allow you to do anything. They differ, in this way, from natural languages, which are designed to communicate about things that your audience is familiar with. Natural languages are therefore flexible, because so much of what is being communicated is already known. (One can loosely define natural language as the means of producing in one creature certain mental states (often images) similar to certain mental states in you; thus we rely on most of the mental state already being there, and don't need to explain what a bird is every time we say that we saw one sitting on a telephone poll.)

Computer languages, by contrast, exist to create machines which can do anything (within a somewhat narrow realm of physical possibilities). As a result, they make no assumptions about what you're trying to say, because there are no assumptions possible. Anything you say might be what you mean. It's not that computers are stupid; it's that they're unprejudiced.

Anyhow, computer languages invariably use certain types of markers, just like we use punctuation. In many languages, semicolons denote the end of an instruction. If you omit one, typically this results in an unintelligible program, since (in general) any two instructions can be combined in several ways, and the compiler can't know whether you had meant to combine them or separate them.

Errors like leaving off semicolons or other small things (akin to punctuation) often plague beginning programmers; they go to compile their programs and get a stream of errors and search about bewildered; many of them cursing at the stupidity of the machine.

Having just compiled something where I accidentally left off the semicolons (I very rarely do that any more), it just occurred to me how different it is now. I'm so used to programming that semicolons are natural (this tends to come fairly quickly); compiler errors are just a different sort of thing to me now. They used to be a mystery to decipher. Now they're actually an aid to getting things right. I intuitively know how to say what I mean, and compiler errors aren't problems, they're more like the signposts on trails. I've come to see the program as a thing, not that the compiler creates, but that I create. I can almost see its pieces working together as if they were real.

It really is amazing what human beings can grow used to.

G.K. Chesterton once said that the most important things about men are the things that they have in common, not the things which separate them; that a nose is much more startling even than a norman nose. That's been occurring to me a lot recently. Having just been married, I've gone through quite a lot of tradition, which is somewhat unusual for me. While I respect tradition, I'm not a very traditional creature — I far prefer to invent things for myself than to follow directions. I don't think that there's anything wrong with following traditions, but it's just not my impulse. If tradition is, as Chesterton once defined it, "democracy which includes the dead as voters", it has some merits, but the dead did also get to rule their own lives. I do not think that I will be stealing much from them if I invent my own traditions too.

But there are some things too important in life to be done wholely new; some things must have some tradition to them, and chief among these are birth, marriage, and death. And here tradition is democratic in another way — it is a great equalizer. It's true that rich people may do the various traditions more expensively, but their money cannot buy new traditions. If a rich woman borrows a diamon worth more than a small country, it is no more borrowed than if a poor woman borrows a much less shiny rock worth less than the dirt from which it was plucked.

Perhaps the thing which got me thinking about this most is how interchangeable all of the participants are; brides and grooms all look alike, and priests do not much differ. If you were far enough away not to be able to see faces, you'd have a hard time telling one couple apart from another at a glance. It is sometimes referred to as "the couple's special day", and this is correct from their perspective. A couple only marries once in the history of the universe (in the Catholic tradition which does not permit divorce, at least). But this misses the point, in many ways. A wedding — like birth and death — is one of the most ordinary things that can happen to a human being. We all do it, and when we do we generally do it very similarly to each other.

One might think of this something like a group of people standing on a mountain. On most days, one things of the mountain like the ground, and notices all of the differences between the people. Some people are a few inches taller than their fellows, some people a few inches shorter. On days like weddings, they stop and notice that they're all 5,000 feet up.