Here's a simple one: You write out the requirements of the program in English and it spits out a program that implements it all.
Please don't take my job.
Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
11–20 of 132 posts
Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
#1250 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…
The ugly: SAS
Siebel CRM
Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
#1350 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…
Despite constantly reading on this website that R is bad or wrong, I somehow manage to get all of my data work done quicker and with fewer headaches than excel, sas, or Python.
Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
#14One possibility: the non-programmer is more open to designing a language that is more than just text.
Programming in plain text (in a monospace font) hasn't changed for decades. It doesn't look like it will change for the foreseeable future either. This isn't because plain text is inherently superior. We're still relying on clumsy, cryptic syntax determined by the limited characters available on a keyboard.
The simplicity of text is very appealing to developers. But arguably, it's modern IDEs that make dealing with plain text tolerable - without them, the simplicity of text would rapidly lose its shine. And modern IDEs are enormous in their complexity and millions of lines of code.
So new programming ideas may come from unexpected quarters. And maybe less likely from developers conditioned by existing languages and tools.
Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
#15LaTeX
I love the output it gives, but the language is quite horrible.
Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
#16LaTeX I love the output it gives, but the language is quite horrible.
Do you really think Donald Knuth [1] and Leslie Lamport [2] are non-programmers?
Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
#17One possibility: the non-programmer is more open to designing a language that is more than just text. Programming in plain text (in a monospace font) hasn't changed for decades. It doesn't look like it will change for the foreseeable future either. This isn't because plain text is inherently superior. We're still relying on clumsy, cryptic syntax determined by the limited characters available on a keyboard. The simpl…
A programming language is rarely only about the language.
Culture, tooling, standard library, testing practices, 3rd party libraries and other things carry significant weight.
I find it a stretch to claim that we are dealing with a monospaced text. As you mentioned, it is more than that. The text we deal with is at least: monospaced linted color-coded hypertext.
Basically in hand-wavy terms: the more self-aware the text is, the better.
Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
#18COBOL was supposed to be just that. It is not considered a nice or beautiful language generally.
COBOL was definitely designed by programmers, not non-programmers. It was sort of aimed at non-programmers, but that was mostly marketing I think.
Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
#19LaTeX I love the output it gives, but the language is quite horrible.
Do you really think Donald Knuth [1] and Leslie Lamport [2] are non-programmers? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Lamport
It's not uncommon for programmers - even for the great ones - to produce code that looks like it was written by non-programmers...
Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
#20TYPOScript, a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) for customizing the TYPO3 Content Management System. Typoscript is not a turing-complete language.
For starters, TYPOscript has very odd semantics for terms like "Object", "datatype", "register", and so on. You can have lines of code like "page = ", or "page Typoscipt was designed in the late 1990s, then by an autodidact or very young CS student(s). I don't know exactly, and I don't want to blame anyone. (nothing personal).
However, as a consequence, as a TYPO3 user I have countless files in my work-related directories that have a ".ts" filename extension - now used by TypeScript a well designed language for which rich toolsets exist.
So when I open a TYPOscript .ts file, practically every word on every line has these red squiggly lines from the linter ... very scary.
TYPOscript has its strengths, though.