31–40 of 69 posts
Interesting stuff. I do like the taxonomy of "computer work", where it's one part logic cognition, and one part ticky-tack details.
Ha, very interesting. I just started using Gleam last week or so... I knew about it and loved Elm back in the day. Anyhow, will enjoy discovering EYG as well.
So I poked around... this is really interesting. So you take language in text and make IR, but also could be made IR directly. That is very interesting. Potentially I could make a version without curly braces or some weird syntax and it could be compiled in IR and still be same language :). Kind of like MS and VB and C# haha. I like what you did so far, I will keep an eye, maybe help if I can.
apply ├── int_negate └── 5
I generally don't think it's a good idea to develop a language for non-developers. It was tried before multiple times and the end goal has not been achieved. Sooner or later one realizes, that professional developers are still necessary, even for languages initially designed for "normies". But such a language is typically not good enough for them, it lacks necessary abstractions, flexibility, performance or something…
Yet BASIC was literally a first stepping stone for small kids into the World of programming. Most of what we have now is because some 6-7yo kids in 80's and 90's had BASIC and could figure out stuff by themself, without external help.
> Sympathy for the machine only exists in developers. They will happily explain why integer overflows need to happen. The average human response to integer overflows is “WTF, that’s not how numbers work”. We have BigInt and 99% of the time the WTF response is the correct one. Forget sympathy for the machine; the real reason we need programming languages that prevent issues because we should have sympathy for the poor…
I generally don't think it's a good idea to develop a language for non-developers. It was tried before multiple times and the end goal has not been achieved. Sooner or later one realizes, that professional developers are still necessary, even for languages initially designed for "normies". But such a language is typically not good enough for them, it lacks necessary abstractions, flexibility, performance or something…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your three examples historically were successful in achieving widespread usage, and in the case of SQL, shows no sign of disappearing.
They are widespread, but not among "normies", but professional programmers. That's what I call a failure, since they were initially designed to be used by non-programmers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
from the article > My hypothesis > Developers deal with two broad categories of work. > - Describing the logic of the problem they are solving using language constructs like if, loop, var etc. > - Working with computers to run those problems using constucts like $PATH, /var/tmp and AWS. > There are a lot of humans who can do the first work fine but don’t have the time to master the second category. I call these human…
AppleScript "English" was designed to be intuitive and easy to understand (or so claimed various manuals), but boy howdy did I spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what "English" it did accept.
I generally don't think it's a good idea to develop a language for non-developers. It was tried before multiple times and the end goal has not been achieved. Sooner or later one realizes, that professional developers are still necessary, even for languages initially designed for "normies". But such a language is typically not good enough for them, it lacks necessary abstractions, flexibility, performance or something…