

The Shakespeare Programming Language - prattbhatt
http://shakespearelang.sourceforge.net/report/shakespeare/

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terminalcommand
The weirdest computer language I have ever seen.

The expressiveness of basic with the user-friendliness of the assembly
language.

I am speechless...

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taylodl
My first thought was this could be a candidate for literate programming
([http://www.literateprogramming.com/](http://www.literateprogramming.com/)),
but it's hard to parse and doesn't seem practical.

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nfoz
This is some kind of amazing.

~~~
MartinMcGirk
I think this is great too. I've just finished reading through it for the first
time - many more times will be necessary until I properly understand it, mind
you - but I love seeing creative uses of programming languages like this.

I sent the link round the office a minute ago and one of my colleagues
mentioned that it reminded him of Perligata[0]. I'd never heard of it, but
it's apparently "a Perl module -- Lingua::Romana::Perligata -- that makes it
possible to write Perl programs in Latin."

I've favourited that one for later reading, else I'll never get any work done
this afternoon.

[0] -
[http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata....](http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html)

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arethuza
Lord what fools these mortals be

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collyw
"The design goal was to make a language with beautiful source code that
resembled Shakespeare plays."

There is nothing beautiful about Shakespeare's plays in my opinion. I got
taught a few of them in "English" class as a teenager. Despite apparently
being "English" there was one page with the Shakespeare version of the text
and a translation into normal / modern English on the page opposite it.

Then there is the iambic pentameter nonsense. Why? Does it actually add
anything? Not that I can see.

Fast forward more than 20 years. Studying Shakepseare all those years back has
had absolutely zero positive impact on my life.

~~~
netrus
Interesting. Always wondered how studying Shakespeare feels for native
speakers. I had a hard time with Shakespeare, but enjoyed equivalent German
poets a lot (though Goethe etc. worked more than a hundred years later ... no
plain text translation is needed). Their language is plain beautiful, and
getting their wit is like solving a riddle.

~~~
leephillips
"Always wondered how studying Shakespeare feels for native speakers"

I wasn't going to chime in, but I think you need another data point. Also, I
had assumed that collyw was pulling our legs - his original comment seemed so
much like satire. But now it seems that he's probably serious.

Shakespeare wrote in Elizabethan English, which is a somewhat archaic form of
Modern English. It is immediately comprehensible to any native reader with
normal language skills, who can read English at a high school level. Not
_fully_ comprehensible, but there is no obstacle to getting the gist, and much
more.

I studied _Hamlet_ with Frank McCourt. We had no "translation" and didn't need
any. It is helpful when starting out to have a glossary of the archaic
meanings of some words used by Shakespeare in a different sense from their
most common meaning today. McCourt needed to explain almost nothing - he
confined his teaching to sharing his love of the work and simply insisting
that we pay attention to the words on the page and think about what the author
was getting at. He mostly refused to explicate the frequent sexual innuendo,
preferring that we figure it out ourselves.

Studying _Hamlet_ was such an immensely powerful experience of aesthetic bliss
that I can remember sitting in that classroom 40 years ago better than most
things that happened last week. And I discovered the inner genius of
Shakespeare: a blending of his characters' states of mind with the texture of
language. This is why the idea of "translation" of this kind of literature is
problematic.

Don't close yourself off from these potential joys because it takes a little
effort.

~~~
collyw
"Studying Hamlet was such an immensely powerful experience of aesthetic bliss
that I can remember sitting in that classroom 40 years ago better than most
things that happened last week."

Interesting, that seems like satire to me! I studied more than enough
Shakespeare to know I didn't like it and didn't gain anything from it.

I don't see how you can describe a "texture to the language" when most of it
required reading a translation of it on the opposite page. I guess that much
of the modern comedy that I see as being very smart and political may be lost
on others.

~~~
leephillips
Maybe not your fault. A bad teacher can make anything seem dull. I've heard
some students even find math unexciting. (I love the scene in Monty Python's
_Meaning of Life_ where the teacher is actually copulating on the desk in
front of the class, but his students are just bored).

"most of it required reading a translation of it on the opposite page"

As I said, it did not. And much of the class came from households where
English was not spoken.

