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

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 finding and exploiting holes in logic.

- doctors debug and apply patches to complex, opaque, nonlinear systems. As a programmer, I can relate.

- teachers break down complex subjects into small digestible chunks that when consumed, produce a desired result. You have to be very literal and precise when giving children instructions; they tend to do what you say, not what you mean.

These three professions are removed from coding but it’s not hard to find analogues to programming in what they do. I think with the right language these people could integrate coding into their work the same way they do writing. And in many cases, with Excel they are. Show me a teacher who doesn’t use a spreadsheet or similar tool to manage their class. You can’t!

I definitely would not agree that it "enables normal people to model complex systems". Not once in my entire career have I seen a business person provide anything of any value to a software's architecture. Even thinking they could is so strange to me I don't even know where to start to unpack it. Software architecture is so different to the processes it models, it would be nonsensical to even have them try. Like asking someone illiterate to organize a book.

Wasn't that whole concept just marketing by Sun to sell Java and OOP to the world? These days everyone using Java uses so much spring and xml I'm not sure it even makes sense to call it OOP anymore. It's more like AOP+DI with a little OOP thrown in.

If anything, I'd think trying to have a customer design your objects would result in a tremendous mess. The nouns and verbs they would think of are going to be extremely limiting once you add in the common needs like caching, parallelism, network boundaries, async processing, auth, logging, monitoring, protocol formatting, API versioning, etc. The hard parts we need help on from business people are understanding the business models completely, not where X function should live and if it should be in a class or not. And even if they did have strong opinions about that, logic is actually much easier to test when it's not in OOP, and I'd rather have automated unit tests.

By "normal" here I meant that you don't have to be some kind of genius in order to model real world using OOP.

And we have shitton of programmers that everyday model real world complexities using OOP

>Wasn't that whole concept just marketing by Sun to sell Java and OOP to the world? These days everyone using Java uses so much spring and xml I'm not sure it even makes sense to call it OOP anymore. It's more like AOP+DI with a little OOP thrown in.

Well, on the other hand C# doesn't have all of that XML fetish/Annotation Oriented Programming (@Transactional :P)/Aspect Oriented Programming magic, so it's not like there's only one interpretation and implementation of OOP and it must be Java's

These probably shouldn’t matter but did for me. FWIW the statistical offering was fantastic.