3 ms·

It would take a lot less training however, if 'programming in English' was widely available.

• jdavis703 10y ago
  English is such an ambiguous language, I would think that training would be a lot harder (especially for native speakers to unlearn the imprecise parts of English).
  • pessimizer 10y ago
    English is so ambiguous and so large that it would probably be best to reduce it to a strict, unambiguous vocabulary.
    • dredmorbius 10y ago
      It might take a few tries to get that right. We might see, say, "Unambiguas English version A", as an experimental or academic version. Then a trial "English B". And maybe on the third try, they'd get it right, say, "English C". We could call it "C" for short. (I know, I skipped BCPL.)
• PeterisP 10y ago
  Probably not. Currently, the part of training/learning time spent in educating developers that refers to the language syntax is at most 5% of the whole; perhaps 10% for the most junior developers; so 'programming in English' saves you just a tiny part of the training. However, as a specialized language can quite plausibly make you 10% or 100% more productive, no one serious would use general english even if it was a possibility. You might imagine a somewhat efficient programming in a very "jargony" english (similar to "legalese") with very specific (and likely unintuitive) meanings of a large number of particular phrases, but then there's no meaningful advantage of it, it's just as far from everyday english as any other programming language, and requires just as much training.
  • cortesoft 10y ago
    Yeah, you can see this in comparing how long it takes a person to learn a new programming language versus someone learning their first programming language. Learning a new language is trivial, learning to program not so much.