Tony Barr has invented several computer programming languages, including the Statistical Analysis System, better known as SAS. He describes the concept of language, as “a mental model to think about the world.” Tony believes he has found the “concept of a concept” that will enable his new language, AMORE, to “redefine computer science.” As a child, he “lived inside his head,” and “never got any support from teachers.” Tony’s mother was “a brilliant person” and his grandfather held a patent on making ice cubes. His words of wisdom, “share the credit, but also take the credit.”

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We'll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we'll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:37

Amore in Italian, it means love. And it's a title of many, a song it's also an acronym for a model of reality and you computer programming language. I'm your host Richard Miles today on Radio Cade. My guest is Tony Barr, a distinguished inventor of other programming languages, such as the Statistical Analysis Systems, SAS, and Acme, the automated classification of medical entities. He holds four U.S. patents and is considered one of the world's experts on programming languages. Welcome to the show.

Tony Barr: 1:05

Thank you.

Richard Miles: 1:06

So if we talk about everything that you know, and every technology you've developed, this would probably be a six to eight hour podcast series, and we'd have to order in lunch and sleeping bags and everything else. So we're going to start out at the ground, and that is, let's start about the concept of language itself, because you have developed programming languages for computers, but really programming languages , just another language, right? So why don't we start at the conceptual level about the function of language, and then we'll move from there to how you have interpreted those functions in your various inventions from SAS on up to a model of reality. Language, what is it for? What do we use it for? Why is it important? How do you think about language?

Tony Barr: 1:45

Language is the way we represent knowledge, the way we communicate knowledge, I actually go one step further beyond language. I think we have mental models in our mind that enable us to think about the world. We build models of organizations called enterprise models that drive the world. The government's got the biggest model in the world. Every business has a model. The museum has got its model for its customers and its exhibits and who their vendors are. We build models to think about the world, to understand the world. Language is a medium to communicate models. And it's my thesis. That the way we represent things in our mind is very similar to the way we represent things in the computer. And my hope is to unify the way we think about the mind, the way we think about the computer. So we have a uniform model, a simpler model for the world to live in. Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could, at the age of 12 learn model of reality. Inside it would be mathematics and logic. It would also be the way the computers work. It could give you the insight is the way you separate the concepts from the objects in the world. And this woul