Eric Blossom of GNU Radio is a funny, enthusiastic speaker. During a recent talk he made an aside about the Erlang programming language, and called it, "One of those languages for smart people." It's what's called a functional programming language, one that doesn't tell the computer what to do but rather describes a situation in terms of relationships, and more-or-less leaves it up to the computer to figure out precisely how to solve the problem. It's a radically different way of thinking, involving higher levels of abstraction — but in Blossom's words it gives a language "serious leverage" and makes it possible to do things that would otherwise be almost impossible.

And it reminds me of the 1949 Robert A. Heinlein science-fiction story "Gulf" wherein a special super-efficient language called Speedtalk lets a secret society of clever people think even faster and better. Probably impossible, of course; if it could be done it likely would have already evolved, since it would give such a huge advantage to those who learned it. Alas, humans may have already almost maxed-out their current hardware ...

_{(cf. Thinking Tools Goas (1999-04-09), Mental Bandwidth Boosters (1999-06-26), Strands of Truth (2000-11-02), Parting Advice (2006-06-21), Higher Level Language (2007-08-17), ...) - ^z - 2008-03-12}

(correlates: MarryTheOne, Comments on HigherLevelLanguage, KiloPixAndMegaWords, ...)