Thinking out loud meets programming

So, I may have mentioned elsewhere that I've settled on Frink, for now at least, as a handy prototyping language, mainly because I can do it relatively easily, and anywhere. OF course I'm probably going to have to convert it all to Javascript at some stage in the future (there ARE alternatives, but that seems like the most likely path) because I want to create this functionality as a web app or a mobile app, but I can't seem to set up a handy coding environment for JS. I'm not saying it can't be done - just that I can't see my way to doing it easily with the knowledge I have. Whereas Frink and Dropbox and I'm done.

When I started out on this project a while ago I thought I'd end up using Prolog, because of its history in language processing. So I detoured for about 6 months teaching myself Prolog. Then I decided not to use Prolog.

Now I'm well into the prototyping stage. I'm a shocking programmer, I van never plan anything. I just right crappy little programs, see a problem, re-write them, and iterate. After a certain point, the rewrite load becomes very onerous, and I always think, if only I'd planned this. But bluntly, if I had planned it, nothing would have happened at all. At least this way I have dozens of half finished projects.

One of the problems is, as discussed previously, knowing the intention of the writer, so as to provide appropriate feedback. One equally obvious solution is to ask the writer their intentions. However, for a couple of different reasons, it's not such a good idea to use technical language in asking the question; at the very least you might be assuming that the learner knows what you're trying to teach them. So I don;t want to ask, What's the subject of this sentence? because if the student knows what a subject is, there's a good chance I don't have much to teach them on that issue. So instead I ask, What's the main word in this sentence?

Yes, well, take a look at that red sentence fragment - I would think the most likely answer to the question about main nouns would be "chance". But the subject is "There" - to navigate from "chance" to "there" and keep my "unassuming" interface, I need a set of special rules to handle, what, clefts; existential there; empty it; plus anything else that comes along.

In fact, it occurs to me that a rule manager might be a really good idea, because there's an awful lot of rules. Gee, what about Prolog? It is built around rules... If only I were a competent programmer. Grrr.

I'm going to resist the temptation to take another 6 month detour into Prolog, because, even if it worked (and history suggests I'll get distracted), that isn't actually going to help my HTML5 application. (although I feel sure someone has implemented logic programming in Javascript).

I'll think about the rule manager later, anyway.

It may also be, of course that the "main word" question isn't such a good idea - but I'm going to stick with it for a time. It's non-trivial. Words like Noun and Verb do not denote universal constructs of the human brain; we very much understand them intuitively via the language in which we use them. What, exactly is a Subject? You may know, for your language, but it's not likely to be universal. There's a popular assumption that the Subject is the Agent of a transitive verb; that's certainly not true of all languages; it isn't really even true of all verbs in English. How about, the Subject is what the sentence is about? See note above... What about "grammaticalised topic", which I saw one in the linguistics literature? Some languages have "grammaticalised" topics and subjects...

Note also little conundrums (conundra?) like Subject-Verb-Object, and Noun-Verb-Noun; it's a concern to me that two quite different theoretical conceptions of a sentence use the same word for one part. If you're talking to technicians, you can use a jargon which avoids/acknowledges/minimises these problems, but when you're coaching a learner - they're not an expert.

Back to the bad programming...