Re: Lua and Neko comparison (Beware the Linguistic Uncanny Valley)

[Don Hopkins <dhopkins@...>]

This month's "gamedeveloper" magazine has an article "Invisible 
Monsters: Tales from the Uncanny Valley".

"The Uncanny Valley occurs when a non-homan's likeness to a human nears 
reality, but lacks perfection."

I think the Uncanny Valley applies to programming language design as 
well as computer graphics. Especially to cargo-cult programming 
languages like JavaScript and PHP, that try to mimick the surface 
appearance of other languages, without understanding the reasons behind 
their design.

The closer one language is to another, the more uncanny the subtle 
differences are. Like C is to C++, C++ is to Java, Java is to 
JavaScript, JavaScript is to ActionScript, and one version of 
ActionScript is to the next.

I like to be able to easily tell what language I'm programming in, and 
it's a good thing that Lisp is way different than C++, and Lua is way 
different than JavaScript.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley

"The Uncanny Valley is a hypothesis about robotics concerning the 
emotional response of humans to robots and other non-human entities. It 
was introduced by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970. It states 
that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the 
emotional response from a human being to the robot will become 
increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond 
which the response quickly becomes strongly repulsive. However, as the 
appearance and motion continue to become less distinguishable from a 
human being's, the emotional response becomes positive once more and 
approaches human-human empathy levels."

An article on drunkenblog [5] uses the Uncanny Valley analogy to 
describe the frustration many computer programmers experience when using 
the AppleScript programming language.

http://www.drunkenblog.com/drunkenblog-archives/000291.html