Orc Language Dictionary

BILL BAILEY: FUNNY SORT OF ORC

Like Jim Carrey, Tommy Cooper and Jack Black, he is just naturally funny.

Which is why – before I even start reviewing his Dandelion Mind Tour – I can tell you right now that you should go and see him.

Shuffling on stage at the distinctly un-atmospheric Brighton Centre, Bill looks more than ever like the son of an orc and a roadie.

Which makes his opening salvo – an attack on the Coalition Government and more specifically David Cameron – all the more hilarious.

Hair flying around like a manic professor, Bill’s description of our country’s leader as a “man-ferret” for whom he always has to do his “weasel shape” drew deep guffaws from the entire audience.

It’s a mark of his genius that, even when he forgot the words to one of his trademark comedy songs about cockneys, he managed to turn it into a funny experience.

While he says the vague theme of the show is “doubt” there is none in my mind about his attack on the England football team – and more specifically Wayne Rooney.

It is the most brutal I have ever heard and I cannot share it here for fear of spoiling it.

Like all comedy geniuses, it’s not just his jokes that are funny, it’s his anecdotes and delivery of a subject.

Just as you can listen to Steven Fry witter on about anything, Bill can make all topics humorous.

Even quantitative easing. Which I never thought I’d be able to spell, let alone laugh at.

Everything that first drew me to Bill as a teenager, watching his It’s Bill Bailey TV show, is still present and correct.

The whimsical, flowery language spilleth forth with a delicate self-mocking which Russell Brand so magnificently fails to capture.

Equally, Bill’s musicianship is exploited to the full, with a slowed-down version of California Dreamin’ being a personal favourite and an acoustic examination of Akon’s Smack That coming in a close second.

More Thoughts on a New Language

This relates to the whole concept of the "dictionary created by executing a block of statements". I find this notion of a "block of statements" being a first-class object appealing. Imagine a function that, instead of having a return value, simply returns its bound local variables. I guess Python modules are pretty much that. But I'm thinking of the notion within a file. ?

Some interesting possibility here, just playing around with the notion of a block as first class object with inheritance and parameterization.

And another crazy though: could this language have something akin to list comprehensions but for these blocks so you could compactly define them programmatically where appropriate? This is a contrived example, but Imagine you have a list of strings and you want to create a block that uses those strings as variable names, all set to an initial value of 1.

That is, you want to get

{ foo = 1 bar = 1 baz = 1 }

Interesting. If you made all statements expressions then the problem with indentation becomes less problematic (but the language starts to look a lot less like Python).

You might be interested in some of the recent blog posts Ola Bini has done whilst he creates a language called Ioke.

If you were serious about experimenting with this then (like Ola) you would get a lot of benefit from targetting an existing VM (JVM or CLR would be the obvious choices - but there is also PyPy and parrot).

(Just in case your comment system strips off whitespace, that is supposed to be a single colon, followed by two indented expressions.)

That way class and function declarations become special cases of the more general idiom.

Language, an introduction to the study of speech

God, Language and Scripture, Reading the Bible in the Light of General Linguistics

Language, the basics

The Language Instinct, How the Mind Creates Language

I-language, an introduction to linguistics as cognitive science