TITLE: Using a Text Auto-Formatter to Enhance Human Communication
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: December 24, 2018  2:55 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
 More consonance with Paul Romer, via
<A HREF="https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/paul-romer-tyler-cowen-economics-education-growth-979315047773">
   his conversation</A>
 with Tyler Cowen:  They were discussing how hard it is to
 learn read English than other languages, due to its
 confusing orthography and in particular the mismatch
 between sounds and their spellings.  We could adopt a more
 rational way to spell words, but it's hard to change the
 orthography of large language spoken by a large, scattered
 population.  Romer offered a computational solution:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 It would be a trivial translation problem to let some
 people write in one spelling form, others in the other
 because it would be word-for-word translation.  I could
 write you an email in rationalized spelling, and I could
 put it through the plug-in so you get it in traditional
 spelling.  This idea that it's impossible to change
 spelling I think is wrong.  It's just, it's hard, and we
 should -- if we want to consider this -- we should think
 carefully about the mechanisms.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

 This sounds similar to a common problem and solution in
 the software development world.  Programmers working in
 teams often disagree about the orthography of code, not
 the spelling so much as its layout, the use of whitespace,
 and the placement of punctuation.  Being programmers, we
 often address this problem computationally.  Team members
 can stylize their code anyway they see fit but, when they
 check it into the common repository, they run it through
 a language formatter.  Often, these formatters are built
 into our IDEs.  Nowadays, some languages even come with a
 built-in formatting tool, such as Go and
<A HREF="https://golang.org/cmd/gofmt/">
   gofmt</A>.

 Romer's email plug-in would play a similar role in
 human-to-human communication, enabling writers to use
 different spelling systems concurrently.  This would make
 it possible to introduce a more rational way to spell
 words without having to migrate everyone to the new
 system all at once.  There are still challenges to making
 such a big change, but they could be handled in an
 evolutionary way.

 Maybe Romer's
<A HREF="https://twitter.com/wallingf/status/1050011717126754304">
   study of Python</A>
 is turning him into a computationalist!  Certainly, being a
 programmer can help a person recognize the possibility of a
 computational solution.

 Add this idea to
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2018-12.html#e2018-12-23T10_45_16.htm">
   his recent discovery of C.S. Peirce</A>,
 and I am feeling some intellectual kinship to Romer, at
 least as much as an ordinary CS prof can feel kinship to a
 Nobel Prize-winning economist.  Then, to top it all off, he
 lists <EM>Slaughterhouse-Five</EM> as one of his two favorite
 novels.  Long-time readers know I'm
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2007-04.html#e2007-04-12T08_16_42.htm">
   a big Vonnegut fan</A>
 and
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2004-11.html#e2004-11-11T17_17_33.htm">
   nearly named this blog</A>
 for one of his short stories.  Between Peirce and Vonnegut,
 I can at least say that Romer and I share some of the same
 reading interests.  I like his tastes.
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