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This is an interesting article about how non-programmers see it. What the author fails to understand is the difference between having a steeper learning curve

This is an interesting article about how non-programmers see it. What the author fails to understand is the difference between having a steeper learning curve versus less verbosity. When you read and write code all day long, you don't really pay much attention to syntax, it's just there to shape the logic. In order to learn, it's okay to have a more familiar pseudo-code to get a feel of what programming is like. But I wouldn't want to write that code all the time. An english-like syntax has already been introduced: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#Verbose_syntax http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#Verbose_syntax

dkersten 15y ago
The article is talking about Perl anyway, which is notorious for its seemingly random syntax, so I don't think its really a good example for how intelligible and random programming language syntax is. When you're a beginner, the languages syntax really does matter and thats one reason why, eg, Python is a better beginner language than Perl. Perl is often jokingly referred to as "line noise" while Python is often referred to as "executable pseudocode". Having said that, I completely agree with what you say. When spending a lot of time writing code, you really don't care about how intuitive the language is for beginners - much more important is that you can accurately and quickly express your programs. The closer to english a language gets, the more verbose the language gets and if I spend a lot of time programming, I want the language to be succint and straight to the point. (Nevermind that English contains a lot of ambiguous constructs, so an "english" programming language would still be horribly artificial for beginners anyway)
- rjbond3rd 15y ago
  > if I spend a lot of time programming, I want the language to be succint and straight to the point. When I was a beginner, I -also- wanted that. For some people, verbose == readable, but for many, it's just not so.
nxn 15y ago
I've been recently somewhat surprised at how much syntax means even to experienced developers. Just look at the very positive responses CoffeeScript has received, especially when compared to the criticism Dart gathered with regards to its syntax (Yeah, those weren't the only complaints, but they did make up a large percentage). Personally, the whole thing made me realize syntax is more or less meaningless to me. I was never really spending that much time making, or correcting, syntax related problems when writing JavaScript in the first place. Though when using CoffeeScript, I was spending a substantially larger amount of time trying to find ways of doing things that I knew were possible in regular JS, but generally avoided in CoffeeScript -- things like mixins, using closures for restricting access to internal members, having members named 'on', etc. In the end I was spending too much time looking at the JavaScript output to see what was going on continue with CS. Its idioms make the popular subset of JS really great, at the cost of making things outside of it less 'natural' than they are in plain JS.

dkersten 15y ago

The article is talking about Perl anyway, which is notorious for its seemingly random syntax, so I don't think its really a good example for how intelligible and random programming language syntax is. When you're a beginner, the languages syntax really does matter and thats one reason why, eg, Python is a better beginner language than Perl. Perl is often jokingly referred to as "line noise" while Python is often referred to as "executable pseudocode". Having said that, I completely agree with what you say. When spending a lot of time writing code, you really don't care about how intuitive the language is for beginners - much more important is that you can accurately and quickly express your programs. The closer to english a language gets, the more verbose the language gets and if I spend a lot of time programming, I want the language to be succint and straight to the point. (Nevermind that English contains a lot of ambiguous constructs, so an "english" programming language would still be horribly artificial for beginners anyway)

rjbond3rd 15y ago
> if I spend a lot of time programming, I want the language to be succint and straight to the point. When I was a beginner, I -also- wanted that. For some people, verbose == readable, but for many, it's just not so.

nxn 15y ago

I've been recently somewhat surprised at how much syntax means even to experienced developers. Just look at the very positive responses CoffeeScript has received, especially when compared to the criticism Dart gathered with regards to its syntax (Yeah, those weren't the only complaints, but they did make up a large percentage). Personally, the whole thing made me realize syntax is more or less meaningless to me. I was never really spending that much time making, or correcting, syntax related problems when writing JavaScript in the first place. Though when using CoffeeScript, I was spending a substantially larger amount of time trying to find ways of doing things that I knew were possible in regular JS, but generally avoided in CoffeeScript -- things like mixins, using closures for restricting access to internal members, having members named 'on', etc. In the end I was spending too much time looking at the JavaScript output to see what was going on continue with CS. Its idioms make the popular subset of JS really great, at the cost of making things outside of it less 'natural' than they are in plain JS.