Wed Jan 6 19:35:46 EST 2010

All human languages are Turing Complete

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I  read  something  recently  in a 2007 article by Larry Wall. It
made my jaw drop because he was right.  He says:

 Perl is a postmodern language,  and  a  lot  of  conservative
folks feel like Postmodernism is a rather liberal notion. So it's
rather ironic that my views on Postmodernism were  primarily  in-
formed  by studying linguistics and translation as taught by mis-
sionaries, specifically, the Wycliffe Bible Translators.  One  of
the  things  they  hammered  home  is that there's really no such
thing as a primitive human language. By which  they  mean  essen-
tially that all human languages are Turing complete.  

I  am sorry, but - wow. Why, "wow"? Because I never thought of it
this way. This certainly complements and  augments  the  views  I
have regarding the human brain and the most powerful computation-
al models that human brains are able to  conceptualize  (i.e.,  a
Turing Machine).

Programming is Hard, Let's Go Scripting...


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