Summer hiatus

Due to health issues and travel (and it's always fun when those coincide) I have not really done any programming or thinking about programming for about two or three months now.  So I'm coming back to a lot of my old ongoing efforts with a fresh eye, and today I had a strange epiphany:

I'm thinking of the platform for a given piece of software as ephemeral now.

For instance, one of the things I'm working on is a parser of English in order to automate some of the language-quality work I do professionally. I'd like to implement that on my usual machine, but for performance reasons it would be convenient to offload it onto the Parallella platform since I expect it will really benefit from it.

So I can't really write it in Perl because of platform conflict. OK, I know Perl will probably run fine on the managing processors - but the point here is not whether Perl will or won't work, the point is that I really want to develop the algorithms and then "compile" them to Perl or C or whatever, as needs require.

This is what Java purports to address, by the way.  But I'm seeing a lot of new languages that "compile" to various high-level languages, notably JavaScript and C, and maybe this is a new modality.

Maybe what semantic programming is about, I tell myself yet again, is working out the semantic content of an algorithm, expressing it at that level, then having it run in whatever platform is required - and if that means "compiling" to a given language, then in a sense it's really coding in that language. The semantic structure is expressed in C or in Perl, but at some level it's also expressed as a bunch of semantic units that could also be used to express an explanation of the code in English, or even to derive a domain-specific language for intermediate work, a set of macros or something like that.

In other words, what I'm internalizing is that in a semantic programming paradigm the computer should be doing more of the work of coding, at a level that reflects a knowledge of the underlying purpose of each part of the code. That naturally ties back into code understanding to reverse-engineer this kind of semantic structure given existing syntactic expressions, but it's output that should logically come first.