Early languages might be good examples, since there wasn't really a defined path of programmer. COBOL, for example, has the feel of a smart, but not traditional programmer approach. Grace Hopper was a mathematics PhD.
Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
61–70 of 132 posts
Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not uncommon for programmers - even for the great ones - to produce code that looks like it was written by non-programmers...
I would also argue that it's quite hard to determine from a Wikipedia article if a person were a good programmer at the time of creating a certain thing about 40 years ago. If my memory serves me correctly, Leslie Lamport [1] created TeX because he wanted to write a book on math but there were no good systems to write math, so he made TeX. So to me, it sounds like he were a math teacher at that time, I have no idea i…
Your memory doesn't serve you correctly! Most parts of your post are factually incorrect...
Lamport didn't make TeX. It was Don Knuth. Lamport wrote the LaTeX macros for TeX to simplify typesetting books and articles.
> I would also argue that it's quite hard to determine from a Wikipedia article if a person were a good programmer at the time of creating a certain thing about 40 years ago.
Ironically, the informative and relevant article you linked does answer this:
Leslie Lamport was a computer scientist from 1970 to 1985. He released LaTex in 1984. So he was a full time computer scientist for more than 14 years before LaTeX. This (plus of course his subsequent career including winning the Turing Award) suggests he was a "good programmer" for most common usages of "good" and "programmer".
Lamport was only a math teacher (at Marlboro College) from 1965 to 1969, 15 years before LaTeX. He was a computer scientist for his entire post-PhD career.
Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
#63Perhaps I'm grumpy, but questions like this irk me. A programming language designed by a non-programmer would simply not work. It would have non-logical magic the non-programmer expects us programmers to create, things like the "do what I mean" function. One would have to seek out someone with a nearly programming language formality in their logical thinking, such as a mathematician, or linguist. Whatever such a non-…
> One would have to seek out someone with a nearly programming language formality in their logical thinking, such as a mathematician, or linguist I’ll give you some examples of people who possess the kind of logical mind you describe here yet lack programming ability: - lawyers work with legal code trying to figure out ways to hack it to help their clients. Say what you will about lawyers, but they are good at findin…
Just because a teacher can describe steps, that doesn't mean that it would be easy to make a computer do it. For example a teacher may say to find Waldo in an image: "scan for people from left to right, top to bottom, and stop when you find a guy in a red and white shirt." This would not work well as a programming language. How should this be compiled? How do you know if someone is a person, how do you know if they are wearing stripped clothes, what exactly counts as red?
Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
SQL made relational programming possible, when computer were too slow to do declarative programming. The modern aproach would be something more highlevel/declarative like Datalog, but given the context SQL made a good tradeoff in terms of programmer control and declarativity. R is ugly because it encourages users to use it wrong. For loops are slow as a snail, but are what everybody uses and teaches, while the proper…
I think something like QBE ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_by_Example ; about as old as SQL) is the way to let non-programmers write queries.
Looks a lot like declarative logical programming language in disguise (Datalog, Prolog).
Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm struggling to think of an aesthetic reason why SQL would be "good" yet R, "ugly".
SQL made relational programming possible, when computer were too slow to do declarative programming. The modern aproach would be something more highlevel/declarative like Datalog, but given the context SQL made a good tradeoff in terms of programmer control and declarativity. R is ugly because it encourages users to use it wrong. For loops are slow as a snail, but are what everybody uses and teaches, while the proper…
I was a huge fan of xlispstat in the 1990s (which I've archived on Github at (https://github.com/jhbadger/xlispstat), but the simple fact is that the majority of the statistics community just didn't like Lisp-like languages, and not only xlispstat, but newer projects like Incanter (statistics for Clojure) have pretty much failed as well. R meets its need far better than a Scheme library that nobody would have used. It's yet another example of "worse is better".
Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
#66Take a look at Ladder Logic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladder_logic
I don't think this was necessarily created by non-programmers, but it was certainly created for them. The language is designed to mimic electrical schematics with the idea being electricians, electrical engineers, etc can easily program and debug in the language.
I'm a software engineer who has worked extensively programming PLCs with Ladder Logic and I must say it can be quite fun to work with.
Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
#67It would probably look a lot like Excel. Most people I work with who are non-programmers but who could benefit from coding spend a lot of their working life in Excel. When we teach them SQL and give them access to our data warehouse, a lot of the time the explanations that stick are thinking of it like a big spreadsheet with lots of pages and columns/rows. Spreadsheets are fundamentally very visual, and have few abst…
You mentioning visual languages makes me think of DRAKON, which was good enough for the Russian copy of the space shuttle project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON
Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
#68Perl comes to mind, given the fact that was trained as a linguistic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall
Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
#69It will be more like Pascal and Ada than something like C or Rust.
I think Non-programmers would want programming to be more graphical, Diagram Dataflow and Graph-like with the help of "script" / functions describing actions. Something like the how current Game Engine are structured.
May be Game Engine should be programming engine.
Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> It has been said that non-programmers used to catch on to APL quite quickly back in the day Thompson and Ritchie also said their secretaries happily wrote troff . Do people get pampered too much today or are we severely underestimating them?
I think we underestimate them, but they also underestimate themselves (I hear a lot of "I can't..." by people who definitely can, once that word is in their head they no longer can but because of the mental block).
Also, there was a major difference between what the secretaries would have been using before troff and their experience with troff. In particular, at that time, they were probably using typewriters. A digital workflow would have been a massive improvement in experience. Need multiple copies? No more carbon copies or retyping, now it just comes off the printer (which may still use a carbon copy, but at least you don't have to retype it). Need to adjust something? At least for future printouts it's just changing the file, and maybe using whiteout and handwriting the correction in a few printouts. Want to reflow the entire page? On a typewriter you start over, with troff you edit.
Today, people have Word and Google Docs, why do they need troff/Markdown/TeX/LaTeX/Asciidoc/org-mode/etc.?
The experience, for the user, is not as qualitatively different as those secretaries would have experienced at the time. Not just secretaries, my parents (a pilot and an engineer) took to computers in the 1970s (in college)/1980s (work, later home) for the same reason, it was a better experience than using typewriters and hand calculating things (even with a calculator).