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I think PowerShell suffers from this issue, except it was defined by people that speak English as a second language.
You're going to have to explain what on Earth you mean. PowerShell just reads (and writes) like someone forced Perl and .NET to have a child. AppleScript, Inform 7, Smalltalk-72, and other "English" languages dream of being in the same boat as PowerShell in terms of consistency, readability, or power.
Mathematicians have been developing more abstract and concise symbols for hundreds of years and it looks nothing like English or any other natural language. If I had to guess I would say that future programming languages will look more like mathematics than anything else.
Have a look at quicksort in J: quicksort=: (($:@(#[)) ({~ ?@#)) ^: (1Cute, isn't it?
I was playing with J for some time - a few weekends maybe - I managed to get to the level of conscious incompetency, which is a lot for such a foreign language and then stopped, I just had enough. J is certainly very powerful, consistent and logical language and I believe that after some years I would be able to read and comprehend J's code almost as fast as any other language from the get go. I'm just not convinced it's worth it.
Put another way: I certainly hope that future programming languages will not look more like J. And you can, of course, grab a J system and use it today if you want.
> "It's far simpler to learn a precise, unambiguous language and manipulate the parser directly." Since no one else has mentioned it yet, Lojban [1] seems like the perfect candidate for this. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People often think of DSLs as a way of making a concise, expressive view of the domain look like English. See, for example, RSpec. (I guess what I'm really saying is that you're right, but you're saying something else, raganwald is right too.)
I'm having a variant of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon where I start seeing something everywhere after writing about it ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5056667 ).
Programming languages all posses one thing that most (perhaps all) natural languages lack: a 1:1 equivalence with some mathematical construct, or an abstraction backed-up by such a construct. In order for a natural language to be useful for programming computers the language must be completely describable in mathematical terms.
> "It's far simpler to learn a precise, unambiguous language and manipulate the parser directly." Since no one else has mentioned it yet, Lojban [1] seems like the perfect candidate for this. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban
http://www.ainewsletter.com/newsletters/aix_0503.htm#loglan http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/Play/lojban.html
It 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 t…
This is a talk by Guy Steele and Richard Gabriel you might like it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nii1n8PYLrc It was beautiful.
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata....
maximum inquementum tum biguttam egresso scribe.