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Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer

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Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer

#21

Post by tiborsaas »

It would look like GPT-3, you enter text and the system translates that to code machines can understand.

A programming language will never be a solution for people who can't program, break down problems to smaller chunks and be able to generalize and create abstractions.

Think about someone who can't drive. To them no matter how good a car is, a car alone will never be the solution to move around (ignore self driving cars for now since you are still required a driving license).

For these people one solution might be a taxi driver who can translate commands to actions to move the car to the destination.

Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer

#22

Post by petra »

Languages are not usually aimed at no-programmers. But low-code tools are aimed at them.

They're done by well funded companies, so I assume a lot of work(by very skilled people) has be done at understanding the answer to OP's question, and so a lot could be learned from them.

Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer

#23

Post by hugh-avherald »

j-pb wrote: post #5

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 struggling to think of an aesthetic reason why SQL would be "good" yet R, "ugly".

Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer

#24

Post by etu »

yrizos wrote: post #19
mkl wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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 if he actually knew programming when starting to work on TeX.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Lamport

Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer

#25

Post by qqqwwweeerrr »

clircle wrote: post #13
j-pb wrote: post #5

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…

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.

I hear the complaint that R is a terrible language mainly from professional programmers.

I'm sure it is poorly designed from a computer science perspective, but there is no programming language out there which makes it so easy to run any model under the sun as does R.

Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer

#28

Post by unsigner »

open-source-ux wrote: post #14

One 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…

Plain text is inherently superior for collaboration (versioning, diffing, merging, blame etc.), maturity of tools (I'm thinking Sublime/vi here, not IDEs), and interoperatbility with other tools (e.g. how easy it is to generate/consume).

Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer

#29

Post by cranium »

Coding is organizing and modifying information. If you didn't code before, you cannot comprehend all the subtleties and will end up squeezing new concepts in your language as you start understanding them. Classical recipe for delicious spaghetti code and we all started there!

Through iterations and deliberate design choices, you may end up with a workable language. But you are no longer a non-programmer by then.

Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer

#30

Post by knbknb »

Principia

A work from the early 20th century, mathematics, logic.

I think some expert called Bertrand Russell's and A.N. Whitehead's "Principia Mathematica" initiative a "bizarre" piece of work, when seen from the perspective of a programming language designer.

I can't make a qualified statement about this, as I am neither a mathematician nor a language designer. And I cannot find the exact quote on the internet, sorry. Just saying.

In code? See for yourself :

https://www.principiarewrite.com/ or https://github.com/LogicalAtomist/principia/blob/master/PL.v

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