gwern comments on E-Prime - Less Wrong

9 Post author: CannibalSmith 08 April 2009 01:01PM

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Comment author: gwern 10 April 2009 03:07:46AM *  8 points [-]

I tried E-prime when I was younger. I ultimately decided that natural language was deceiving in this respect. Syntactic level restrictions don't buy you much, as they are way too easy to get around, inadvertently break, and are fundamentally a weakening and not a strengthening of the language.

To put it in programming terms, E-prime wasn't much more useful for me than Hungarian notation is for a C programmer. What is useful is a type system which is actually a type system and not an ad-hoc convention or design pattern! It needs to be enforced ('strong') and provide powerful facilities for saying the correct things (something on the level of Hindly-Milner type systems, with all the good things like abstract data types and polymorphism). E-prime fails on both counts.

(Lojban may be better in these respects, but I don't know enough about it.)