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.
Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
31–40 of 132 posts
Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
#32Version 1 might look odd but version 3 would look an awful lot like a normal programming language. There is no special "programmer" phenotype of person, there's only people who program. All of our current programming languages ultimately trace their history to non-programmers.
Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
#33QBASIC
Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
#34It 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…
An improved version would be for GPT-3++ to ask clarifying questions when designing/building the app, rather than merely receiving commands
Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
#35Perhaps 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-programmer would create, it would have giant logic holes they never imagined, rendering the toy "language" unusable for anything beyond the toy concepts the non-programming imagined, and those would require that "do what I mean" function to work at all.
Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
#3650 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".
I don’t know R but SQL is definitely ugly.
There is no world in which listing the columns before the tables in a SELECT statement is a good idea. It makes intellisense/autocomplete awkward.
Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
#37It would look like HyperTalk. I still get a kick out of a programming language that feels like English, prepositions and all.
Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
#3850 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".
R has a lot of surprises built in and is fairly inconsistent. That makes it harder to fully learn (always have to pull up docs for everything). Also it means every so often I'll forget some weird edge case of a function and get a totally wrong result. For a certain class of work, this is fine: if you use it every day and are confident catching errata you'll learn all the weirdnesses. Many professional programmers work in a half dozen languages a week, so one that is significantly harder to learn will feel frustrating. For me it'll be actually slower to get the same result as other tools since I have to relearn its unique way of working.
Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
#3950 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…
50 years ago was 1971. There were lots of programmers and programming languages in 1971. By then we had Fortran, Algol, Cobol, Logo, Basic, Simula, Lisp, Snobol, B, APL… I could go on.
Re: Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
#40AppleScript is sort of an attempt at that isn't it?
I got there by thinking 'probably not that far off python, but even more pseudocodey, a load of redundant keywords like `for every item in` instead of `for v in`' -- and such constructs probably wouldn't bind variables, you'd repeat yourself referring to `the item` or something.
I also think there'd probably be a lot of focus on (high school) mathematical functions (since that would be the expectation of what computers must be like) and graphics (because that's what computers look like). So everything would be about identifying pixels on the screen and colouring them, locating the cursor by position, that sort of thing.