Talk:Language list

From Esolang

Contents 1 Redirect from Main Page 2 Category? 3 Please don't add URLs 4 *W and [] 5 Enhanced language list 6 (())? 7 This page 8 new esoteric language

Redirect from Main Page

I don't think it is a good idea to redirect here from the Main Page. The main page should, IMHO, contain a brief description of the project and encourage people to participate. And it should link to the article explaining the concept of an esolang, and the language list

Rune 14:38, 26 May 2005 (GMT)

The idea was to make it possible to access the language list from every page. If I can figure out how to change the list of links on the left side, I'll do that instead. Graue 16:00, 26 May 2005 (GMT)

Yes, that would be better. I think it might be in the skins, but I'm not sure. Rune 17:06, 26 May 2005 (GMT)

I looked into it, and found some info here. There seems to be two ways to do it. Manually editing the LocalSettings.php (which we should avoid IMHO) or changing the text and url of the items already there. I suggest replacing Current events with the Language list. I tried to test it myself, but I was not allowed to edit the relevant pages.

The text of the Current Events link is the contents of this page: MediaWiki:Currentevents, and the url is the contents of this page: MediaWiki:Currentevents-url. So if they are replaced with Language list I think it would work. Rune 18:03, 26 May 2005 (GMT)

Category?

Might not this "article" be better off as a category? That is, with an "Esolangs" category marker at the bottom of each esolang article, this page could be automatically generated by MediaWiki. --Chris Pressey 21:27, 2 Jun 2005 (GMT)

It definately could. However, if we keep it as a normal page we can have a short description of each language, next to the link (like in the Wikipedia). I don't think that can be done with categories. And I think that is something we should do. Just the name of the language doesn't tell very much. --Rune 21:55, 2 Jun 2005 (GMT)

I think the list would get cluttered and inconsistent, just like it is on Wikipedia, if we did that. The best reason for the list to exist is so we can look at the red links and know what we have to fill in. Later we should add categories for languages (stack-based languages, two-dimensional languages, etc.) and those could all be subcategories of an "Esoteric programming language" category. --Graue 22:03, 2 Jun 2005 (GMT)

I just discovered at least one language (SMATINY) that was not on the list despite being in the Languages category. --Ørjan Johansen, 15 May 2006

Thanks for fixing it. You wouldn't happen to know more details about this language? I notice that the article lacks both the name of the Author and a link to a specification of the language. --Rune 00:37, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Author would be me, specification would be the Wiki page. :-) --Ihope127 01:39, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

OK. What year did you make this language (for categorization)? --Rune 10:56, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

2005, apparently. /me adds the category --Ihope127 01:17, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

Please don't add URLs

Instead of adding URLs for new languages here, make a stub page with a one-line description and a link to that URL. I think that will help weed out some of the Wikipedia cruft that just doesn't belong here, like BANCStar, which is clearly not an esoteric programming language. --Graue 21:07, 4 Jun 2005 (GMT)

*W and []

There are currently two esolangs under 0-9 which do not start with a number. Do we need a "non alphanumberic" listing, are they so few there's no point in making another listing or should they be moved to S for Star W and B for Brackets? --BodyTag 09:02, 20 Sep 2005 (GMT)

I don't think they should be moved to W and B. A non-alphanumeric listing is probably the solution. Or extending 0-9 to include them. --Rune 13:13, 20 Sep 2005 (GMT)

Yeah, making a new category for non-alphanumeric sounds good to me. --User:Keymaker

Done. --Rune 21:42, 20 Sep 2005 (GMT)

In a related manner, should other characters when used because of their resemblance to letters be where the letters would be? For example, should l33t and L00P really be considered to be leet and loop, which they currently are, or should they not? And in that case where should they be? I really think about trivialities too much. It would be easier to sort this list ASCIIbetical, because it would at least stop me from asking stupid questions about the sorting :P --BodyTag 21:20, 3 Dec 2005 (GMT)

I think the way they are sorted now is fine. --Rune 19:07, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

Another similar question would be this: If I made a programming language called ギピオヘ would I list it under non-alphanumeric, or G (as in GIPIOHE), or what? --Zzo38 17:58, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

I would definately put it under "other". --Rune 19:02, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

Enhanced language list

I'm working on an improvement of the Language List in my user space; the current version is here. This is a bit of esoteric programming in its own right; after reading a chance comment on Wikipedia that wiki markup could sometimes get like INTERCAL, I thought I'd try something really complicated. The list is implemented as a quadruple-transclusion and works by abusing wiki-markup and CSS. Eventually, I hope to have a better explanation on the page of what it means, and more visual niceties, such as corrections for very long language names and graphics rather than letters over the right (which don't mean anything very obvious at the moment). The lists are mostly based on categories and so some of the given details are inaccurate, and not all the languages are on the list (the ones missing are the ones I didn't feel like writing summaries for ;-)). ais523 16:04, 22 Jun 2006 (UTC)

Woah, that is some excellent work! It'd be great to have a such language list! Perhaps we could have something page "short language descriptions" or something, or just change our language list to that. Very nice. --Keymaker 21:51, 22 Jun 2006 (UTC)

Nice! But how to maintain something like this when people add new languages? The current User:ais523/LanguageDatabase does not look like something you would want to edit by hand. I suppose a robot would collect information (such as categories) from the article pages (did you already write one to make this?), and there would need to be a template for summaries. --Ørjan 22:25, 22 Jun 2006 (UTC)

Great work! This would be a very nice feature to have. As Ørjan, I am also a bit concerned how easy it is to maintain, but I'm sure a reasonable solution can ba found :) --Rune 16:14, 24 Jun 2006 (UTC)

I created it in a semi-automated manner (instead of writing a bot, I just looked through the categories by hand and entered them into a spreadsheet, which produced the appropriate code). The Language Database isn't actually as bad as it looks; it's basically a name and a description followed by many 'radio-button'-like truth values. The descriptions of what they do are at User:ais523/Language.

As for the maintainance problem, probably a bot or something like that would be required, unfortunately. One problem with transclusion in this MediaWiki version is that a transcluded page must be edited to update the changes, so the job isn't trivial.

Another problem with the current version is that some of the data on the right is probably incorrect; I used a 'default' line for uncategorized or partially categorized languages, which will probably be wrong in at least some details for many of the languages.

The last problem is the length of the produced HTML; all the data is there in every version (even the filtered onesone), just hidden through CSS, so there's a lot of redundant HTML if you View Source on the page. I'm not sure whether that would be a problem on slow connections or not.

In all, I think the best solution would be the one MediaWiki use for Special:Recentchanges; to keep the existing Language List as the 'default' that users navigate to, and to link to the 'enhanced' version, perhaps with a warning about up-to-dateness and connection speed. ais523 07:38, 26 Jun 2006 (UTC)

(())?

OK, I went through the language list and managed to make some kind of stub for all the missing links, except one: (()). I don't know if it is possible to search the web for non-alphanumerics, but my attempts so far have failed. Ihope127, since you added the language to the list, could you please tell what it is? --Ørjan 20:31, 27 Jul 2006 (UTC)

It seems to have evaporated. It was some language that I was going to post, but I never got around to doing to. --Ihope127 20:56, 27 Jul 2006 (UTC)

This page

I agree with Keymaker that something needs to be done about this page. (Well done, Keymaker, you beat me to removing the latest wave of vandalism by a few seconds.) Disabling edits by unregistered users is the usual technique (that Keymaker's done here), but I was thinking about trying an alternative; the spambots seem to be using edit-section links, so I was planning to disable section editing on this page for a while to see if it made a difference. What do people think of the various possibilities? --ais523 14:50, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

new esoteric language

Where I can to offer a new esoteric language? --Logic 12:24, 26 August 2008 (UTC)