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EYG: A Programming Language for Humans

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Re: EYG: A Programming Language for Humans

#41
post #2

Functional programming paradigms? Matching? Complex syntax? Sorry but either I've missed the point, or you've lost me. If we're trying to create tools for non-Developers to build software, this isn't it. You can pretty much already just ask Claude/Codex/whatever and it'll build you a thing™ and it'll probably work. You don't even need to read the code.

Surprisingly, I've met non-programmers who easily learned languages considered "strange" or difficult to understand by professional programmers (Forth is even somewhat popular among astronomers, but I've also met people using Prolog for their programming needs, even J).

I've worked quite a bit with scientists who mostly use Python for their programming-related tasks. To me, it seems that the reason to work with Python has very little to do with the qualities of the language, rather the tools and the community around it. There's nothing specially intuitive or helpful about Python when it comes to doing scientific stuff, not anymore than, say, in PHP or Lua etc. languages from the same general category (which we don't see used in the same setting). It's the libraries / tools like NumPy and Jupyter that make the difference.

From just looking at EYG, I can't tell if it's a good match for the problem or not. But, really, the language design doesn't seem to play an important role in this context. If it somehow manages to win popularity among the people it's trying to engage -- great! But, unless one has an army of "evangelists" and the marketing budget rivaling GDPs of smaller countries, the success seem to be completely random and unpredictable (with quite low success rate).

Re: EYG: A Programming Language for Humans

#42

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.

Because we call someone using a programming language a programmer. But certainly many professionals who arent full-time programmers write Excel formulas or queries.

The intention of SQL was to be used by domain experts rather than computer scientists. I’d say it have been successful at that.

Re: EYG: A Programming Language for Humans

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would love having the capability of just writing json-esque SQL that has the most basic type checks, alas we live in purgatory with weird build systems to validate queries.

What is json-esque SQL?

Re: EYG: A Programming Language for Humans

#44

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.

[deleted]

Re: EYG: A Programming Language for Humans

#45
post #34

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…

By your logic ... BASIC is useless. By your logic ... people are born a programmers. 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.

I don't think this is the logic of the parent, and BASIC wasn't a non-developer PL at all. It was simplified but followed those days' programming practices, and one may say was closer to raw assembler than most today's high-level languages

Re: EYG: A Programming Language for Humans

#46

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…

There is one example that succeeded and became the most widely used programming paradigm on the planet: Spreadsheets

Though you might argue that the "programming language" part was rather accidental

Re: EYG: A Programming Language for Humans

#49
post #46

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…

There is one example that succeeded and became the most widely used programming paradigm on the planet: Spreadsheets Though you might argue that the "programming language" part was rather accidental

And interestingly using Excel resembles pure functional programming in a lot of ways

Re: EYG: A Programming Language for Humans

#50

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.

I think this has less to do with design flaws of SQL and more to do with normie users historically not touching databases and query engines directly
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