Lambda the Ultimate

Give that we don't have great, flexible, powerful, down-to-earth HLLs for information, perhaps one sign of an experienced dev is somebody who has tricks or practices up their sleeve for dealing with information. E.g. they know how to support having Excel read/write to Java or whatever other real-world use cases come up. Things like Java probably end up making that harder than it has to be? Things like Haskell or O'Caml (or VB? :-) seem to enable and attract people who can come up with nifty tricks to automate a lot of things that are done more laboriously in e.g. Java. A language which lets you do that (if you can figure out how) is 'better' than one which doesn't, i should think. Sure, somebody could externalize all the verboseness of a solution in e.g. Java into some library and that's great, but it is better if somehow the system lets you get it done w/out all that finger typing.

I think it's a matter of what language computers speak...a matter of protocol, if you wish.

For example, I can't ask the computer next to me to find all photos with a certain person in it. One reason is that there is no common definition of photo. Another reason is that there is no protocol for asking.

Of course, I could setup a database in the computer next to me. But I can't store photos in databases. I can store BLOBs, but what is a BLOB? it's not a photo.

I could make a public directory with photos. But then I would have to put all the photos there...which means that the person that makes a photo must place it in the special photo directory.

I hope you can see where I am going...there is a trend, isn't it? computers, as they are, contain binary data, but they don't contain information. That's the number #1 reason why we can't go "beyond programming languages".

There are countless other examples, and although I find this conversation much more important than the PL mathematics, I doubt other LtU members wish to be involved, from what I see so far.

I am still waiting for someone to make an operating system that does not have the concept of filesystem/process, but the concept of information/function. Microsoft promised us a similar thing with WinFS, but they did not release it with Vista in the end.

...logics, ontologies, and knowledge representation schemes.

Sure, knowledge representation schemes. Winograd himself described this approach as a matter for extensive research -- codespeak for "We don't have much to show for our efforts yet."

Once again it is important not to let our preconceptions get in the way. Notions such as code, listing, file, and compilation are based on the idea of a program as a set of instructions. There need not be any directly corresponding objects in a higher level system. Instead, it should be based on something much more like what we now think of as an artificial intelligence system with its "knowledge base" of assertions and procedures. There will be a set of interrelated descriptions, stored in a form that makes it possible to retrieve, manipulate, and display them. These will include prototypes for categories of objects and processes (like classroom and filling out a form) and instances, which correspond to individual objects and processes in one of the domains (such as the course CS 365 in Winter 1978, the contents of the third page of next quarter's schedule, and the process currently running in the database server). Instances can be described by more than one prototype, and prototypes are related into hierarchies with different degrees of abstraction. The details of all this are still a matter for extensive research. One set of possibilities is being explored in KRL [6, 7], but the basic idea of higher level systems could be implemented using other descriptive representations, such as semantic networks [8, 10, 14, and 15] and other frame-based systems [9, 11].

Has anything changed in the past 30 years?

In the bioinformatics world, there are successful ontologies such as GO. Now, you have to take "successful" with a grain of salt because - and this is I'd hazard to guess one of the reasons we still don't have Achilleas' information systems but only programming systems - human knowledge is quickly found to be only fuzzily defined. Seriously, the standard joke of biology is, "define the term 'gene'" and yet it has to be one of the most fundamental concepts for the field!

...much research in biology is dedicated to the goal of producing an adequate definition for the term "gene"--or to showing that we should discard the concept.

And I suspect that ultimately, we'll discard (or heavily modify) the concept of gene--the old "model" of a discrete bit of information, biologically encoded and corresponding with some observable phenotype, will be shown to be far too simplistic to be useful.

<http://www.cyccorp.com>

When it comes to Doug Lenat's enterprising endeavors, incrementality is measured in μLenats.

At least they have paying customers. :-)

Personally, I like PowerLoom for KR tasks.