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

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

#111

Post by yesenadam »

invisiblerobot wrote: post #100
jasonhong wrote: post #59

You will be very interested in my colleague Brad Myers' work on Natural Programming. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~NatProg/ In particular, one of his PhD students John Pane did a number of studies looking at how people would naturally describe the behaviors in Pac Man. It was really nice work. You should also take a look at Programming by Demonstration. One book, Watch What I Do, is published online in its entirety by the e…

Do you have a link for the pacman behaviours? Can't find it

I found one:

https://www.academia.edu/download/51057466/Studying_the_lang...

It's the 2nd top result by citations on Pane's google scholar page

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=cOeUEwEAAAAJ&hl=en

Thanks GP for the lead - I looked at a few of his papers studying how average people use and talk about program features, all very interesting stuff. Just started to check out the Natural Programming site - the rock-based acronyms alone are so awesome hehe.

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

#112

Post by ryankrage77 »

saltyfamiliar wrote: post #108

One thing I've noticed always seems to amaze non-programmers as they're taking their first foray into using computers in more advanced ways (programming, scripting, even just using a command-line) is how little room there is for typos. I've frequently heard things like, "if you forget a single semicolon the whole thing doesn't work!" To me, it just seems obvious that if you make a mistake, the computer won't know wha…

Clearer error messages would go a long way too. Python is often considered beginner friendly, but it usually can't even tell you which line a syntax error is on.

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

#113

Post by lamontcg »

OJFord wrote: post #40

AppleScript is sort of an attempt at that isn't it? I got there by thinking 'probably not that far off python, but even more pseudocodey, a load of redundant keywords like `for every item in` instead of `for v in`' -- and such constructs probably wouldn't bind variables, you'd repeat yourself referring to `the item` or something. I also think there'd probably be a lot of focus on (high school) mathematical functions…

> So everything would be about identifying pixels on the screen and colouring them, locating the cursor by position, that sort of thing.

Logo

Bring back the turtle.

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

#114

Post by t-3 »

999900000999 wrote: post #79

Python is pretty close. I would pay good money to watch random people try to do something like get all the names from a CSV file in different programing languages. Have them on a zoom with a Senior Software Engineer. But said Senior Engineer is not allowed to write any code directly. In this hypothetical game show, I'd imagine most software engineers would pick python to try and teach remotely. Although it would be f…

Python is easy enough to teach in schools, but on the fly to someone with no experience? You'd want a language without syntax, like Forth.

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

#117

Post by peterhalburt33 »

bsenftner wrote: post #35

Perhaps I'm grumpy, but questions like this irk me. A programming language designed by a non-programmer would simply not work. It would have non-logical magic the non-programmer expects us programmers to create, things like the "do what I mean" function. One would have to seek out someone with a nearly programming language formality in their logical thinking, such as a mathematician, or linguist. Whatever such a non-…

Actually, I fall right into this category. I’m a mathematician who has just started to program for “real” this year (Python mostly, trying to learn C++, and Mathematica if you consider it a language). Actually, I find it hard to criticize anything about these languages, and most of the time I find my thinking aligns quite well with them.

The main thing I wish for is not a feature in the language, but introductory books for an audience like myself.

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

#118

Post by Tozen »

ksec wrote: post #69

It will be more like Pascal and Ada than something like C or Rust. I think Non-programmers would want programming to be more graphical, Diagram Dataflow and Graph-like with the help of "script" / functions describing actions. Something like the how current Game Engine are structured. May be Game Engine should be programming engine.

I agree with you. It would look more like Pascal and Ada because of readability. Many languages look like or are way too easy to turn into cryptic chicken scratch, that even confuses the person that wrote it when they return to it after a few weeks or months.

The IDEs for it would be more like Delphi (without the price tag) or Lazarus (open source). Way more likely to want WYSIWG GUI designers. They can't go no code (total visual programming), if they want a more useful language, but would want it to be low code. In addition, very helpful to use IDEs and fast compilers (like Pascal/Object Pascal has).

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

#119

Post by AnimalMuppet »

I worked with an artist to design user interface menus for a video graphics system. I'd design a menu that did what was needed. It was ugly. The artist would look at it, and say "That's like picking your nose with boxing gloves on."

Then he'd draw this beautiful menu. And I'd say, "How does it know that you want to do X instead of Y?"

We'd go back and forth, and wind up with something that was both graphically good and also unambiguous.

If you just have the non-programmer doing the design, I worry that it would stop at the "ambiguous" stage. There's a level of technical rigor that is needed, and non-programmers may find it hard to achieve it.

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