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Natural language considered harmful
- mechanical_fish 19y agoMy first thought on seeing this headline: "Oh, this is going to be about why Applescript totally sucks." And, sure enough, there's Applescript halfway down the essay, as an example of a classic antipattern in DSL design: the "Oh, if I make it read like English it'll be really easy to write with it" antipattern. When I look at Applescript I can't believe that there are people in the world who think that Lisp is hard to learn. I liked RSpec when I tried it, but I have to admit that PragDave has a point: it is right on the hairy edge of being too cute with the English syntax. It took me some time to learn to write it properly.