101–110 of 132 posts
In general, it helps students to write a quick application and focus to the important part at the cost of limiting the environment to labVIEW.
I’ve actually posed this question to non programmers. The language they come up with usually resembles natural language English. Alternatively it looks like a box/line drawing. It almost never looks like programming as we conceive it.
It's also not a general-purpose language in many cases. To the extent that I have made languages (mostly re-implementations or extensions) that were meant to be used by others (usually engineers doing analysis, or operators of a complex system), they had developed a bespoke DSL that represented their problem domain. They tended to fall into two modes: command oriented with mutation, declarative query languages. The d…
Declarative query languages are where it's at for non programmers IMO. SQL + Excel + Matlab is the sweet spot IMO. Why? Because non-programmers have the most success with these languages! No need to explain Excel. SQL is known by all kids of non-programmers. For example, my father in law sells directory ads. He is one of the least knowledgeable people about computers, and even he knows SQL. Matlab and other array languages also have quick uptake by non-programmers in my experience.
If designed by a well educated philosopher or linguist, probably similar to some 70s or 80s language.
If by someone with no prerequisites then it would be full of ambiguity - just like natural languages.
50 years ago, these people were quite common. There were only mathematicians and engineers, but programmers didn't exist yet. The good: Excel, Dataflow Diagrams (commonly found in game, music and arts), SQL, Declarative Dataflow Paradigms in general. Mutablity is counterintuitively counterintuitive if you don't have a model of the underlying execution system. The weird: Prolog, APL, languages done by mathematicians a…
I'm of the age that I also consider 50 years ago to be the dawn of computing. Turns out it's closer to 75. :-) It has been said that non-programmers used to catch on to APL quite quickly back in the day. Faster than regular programming languages in fact. The designers, Ken Iverson, didn't even design the language to be run on computers but rather as a mathematical notation. Someone else mentioned Excel, and that is a…
A programming language for "normal" people would not start counting at 0. For starters.
So my guess is that a programming language created by a non-programmer would be extremely tolerant to typos. References to non-existent variables and functions would resolve to the nearest existing options. Semicolons, commas, parentheses and brackets would be strictly optional. This seems to be closer to the way people naturally use language.
A programming language for "normal" people would not start counting at 0. For starters.
You could also support inline literal values, etc. similar to Color Forth.