Communications of the ACM
New Progamming Language Makes Social Coding Easier
Credit: MIT
The open source Dog programming language from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers could make it easier and more intuitive to code social apps, as well as enable novices to learn coding with less difficulty through its use of natural language.
MIT Media Lab professor Sep Kamvar says Dog came out of the desire "to start writing a programming language that allowed me to write at the same level of abstraction that I think." Kamvar says Dog addresses challenges, such as easing the identification of people by making them a basic data type that the language can recognize, and then creates a simple syntax around such concepts that employs natural language and is concentrated on a small set of clear commands.
Kamvar notes users also can import functions from other programming languages, enabling interaction design and social processes to be written in Dog while other functions can be written in another language. Kamvar and colleagues have been devising the Dog compiler and writing demo programs in Dog to test it out. Among the programs is a peer-to-peer teaching-and-learning platform called Karma. Dog is a server-side language, but the group that created it also is developing a client-side version.
From Technology Review
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