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Yes, upon reading the obvious-flamebait title I asked myself, "What does it mean for a language to be accurate?", and "How could something randomly generated po
by RickHull 15y ago
Yes, upon reading the obvious-flamebait title I asked myself, "What does it mean for a language to be accurate?", and "How could something randomly generated possibly be more accurate than something designed?". I did not expect my questions to be answered by the article, and in that I was not disappointed.
- j_baker 15y agoI didn't intend the title to be flame bait. I only wanted to get to the gist of the matter as tersely as possible, which isn't easy. What would you have titled this? EDIT: And why the downvote? I would actually be interested to hear a better title.
- smokestack 15y ago"Perl's syntax is as intuitive to beginners as that of another language whose tokens and keywords were randomly-generated" is verbose, but accurate. The structure of Randomo was entirely based on Quorum, with certain tokens and keywords randomized. The study really only speaks to the "intuitiveness" of the most superficial parts of those languages' syntax, which is something that Quorum happens to focus on: action z(integer a, integer b, integer c) returns number number d = 0.0 number e = 0.0 integer i = a repeat b - a times if i mod c = 0 then d = d + 1 end else then e = e + 1 end i = i + 1 end edit: I realize the title I gave isn't short enough to post on HN, but I wanted to reply just to make a point about the study, not your title.
- wazoox 15y agoActually Quorum looks much more verbose than Perl. That may be the main distinctive feature helping absolute newcomers to grasp the code. In that vein, Java probably would fare way better than most terser languages, too. This would be something to test for (on a significant number of guinea pigs preferably).