The English-Likeness Monster Stalks a New Generation of Programmers
raganwald.posterous.com
The English-Likeness Monster Stalks a New Generation of Programmers
1–10 of 78 posts
Re: The English-Likeness Monster Stalks a New Generation of Programmers
#2I had the misfortune of writing some AppleScript just the other day, and I have to say this post is spot-on.
Re: The English-Likeness Monster Stalks a New Generation of Programmers
#3the point about dsls for business logic is a good one. it always sounds so good in theory...
i'd love to hear success stories about this. what makes a dsl intended for domain experts work? i suspect it's got little to do with the dsl and a lot to do with politics and motivation of the parties involved. and unicorn blood, of course.
[edit: limiting functionality (related to raganwald's reply below) reminded me of this exchange - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5111265 - which was perhaps a wiser approach than i thought at the time. lbrandy says: "as simple as possible for analysts to use". and that seems to have been a success story.]
Re: The English-Likeness Monster Stalks a New Generation of Programmers
#4the point about dsls for business logic is a good one. it always sounds so good in theory... i'd love to hear success stories about this. what makes a dsl intended for domain experts work? i suspect it's got little to do with the dsl and a lot to do with politics and motivation of the parties involved. and unicorn blood, of course. [edit: limiting functionality (related to raganwald's reply below) reminded me of this…
Re: The English-Likeness Monster Stalks a New Generation of Programmers
#5The point is to some extend right, that you need in a general purpose language an easy way to reason about the consequence. But DSLs are very useful in their analogy towards another system, i.e. Mathematica is very successful in that way.
Another example is Siri. If the end result is not of most importance and an educated guess is acceptable when Siri for scripts could be a way to easily program the device.
Re: The English-Likeness Monster Stalks a New Generation of Programmers
#6I'm not sure DSLs qualify as "the English-Likeness monster". A good DSL isn't about being like english, it's about being concise and expressive in the given domain.
A good DSL has no need to "look like English".
Re: The English-Likeness Monster Stalks a New Generation of Programmers
#7It makes me think of MUDs, specifically my once-upon-a-time favorite, Dragonrealms. It had the usual "command direct-object" syntactical format common to MUDs, but it became an infamous problem to wrestle with the parser to find the correct "obvious" action.
> put amulet on drawer
> put amulet in drawer
> put amulet behind drawer
> place amulet on drawer
> give amulet to drawer
> push amulet to drawer
> show amulet to drawerRe: The English-Likeness Monster Stalks a New Generation of Programmers
#8I think PowerShell suffers from this issue, except it was defined by people that speak English as a second language.
Re: The English-Likeness Monster Stalks a New Generation of Programmers
#9There is nothing wrong with code that looks like english. The problem is that you can take that too far, or just sometimes not learn the actual syntax and try to use English instead. That isnt a problem for many languages. I really havent seen a lot of code where an attempt to make it read more like english was.making it less readable or causing other problems.
Also, there is a system for logical rules called Attempto Controlled English which I think has some proven use cases for business rules.
Re: The English-Likeness Monster Stalks a New Generation of Programmers
#10I think Wittgenstein demonstrated how much can be said in a language that doesn't have direct meaning when it comes to a logical framework. I think it's also underestimated the computing horsepower our brain uses to merely handle the ambiguity inherent to language. Given that to execute a program language needs to fit into some kind of logical, causal, framework, and that computers don't deal well with ambiguity, it's not surprising that this is a problem.