The “Dronut”, A Cree Programming Language, and Watching Jellyfish Think

I find you the finest reading material in this week’s “Linkfest”

You’ve worked enough for today. Time to take a break!

Kick back for an hour with this week’s Linkfest — the finest meats and cheeses I could find in the infinite aisles of the interweb …

1) 💻 A programming language using Cree words and concepts

I just spent half an hour inhaling this fascinating Q&A with Jon Corbett, a Cree technologist who’s building a programming language and toolset for writing code using words and concepts from indigenous cultures. That one you see above? It’s his first implementation, using Plains Cree.

It’s wildly ambitious. Corbett’s goal is to create coding tools that reflect the central role of storytelling and oral-knowledge transmission in indigenous culture. Each program in his Cree coding language begins with a “smudge”, and you write a program by telling a story, using traditional characters like “wîsahkecâhk”, Raven, and “maskwa”, Bear. Corbett developed fonts for the project and even built custom circuitry for a hardware keyboard based on the Cree star chart (!!), seen below.