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Around 1981, in the early days of Personal Computer World, one of the very early UK personal computer magazines, there was an article which it seems I will neve

Around 1981, in the early days of Personal Computer World, one of the very early UK personal computer magazines, there was an article which it seems I will never forget. The journalist excitedly expounded on a new application that was being written, called "The Last One", or TLO. The idea was that the application understood a business requirement expressed in English, thereby making all other application development languages/systems redundant. Safe to say, we're still not there yet. P.S. also in PCW, a great magazine in its day, was another article about a program that could keep compressing files repeatedly to make them really small. I haven't see that yet, either.

kd1220 15y ago
And we will likely never get there. A good place to start reasoning about programming languages is the philosophy of language. Frege, Hume, Wittgenstein, Searle are some interesting figures in this space. Many language philosophers believe there are some basics of language that everyone grasps, and the particulars of a language evolve from necessity. Fortunately there is little agreement on what these basic elements are. This is what makes it interesting. "Evidence-based programming languages" won't solve anything by finding natural-language equivalents for difficult syntax. What natural language will these equivalents be created in? English, Japanese, Arabic? All languages? Will Japanese programmers share their code with English programmers by means of a Babel fish? The idea of a poorly designed language is nonsense. All languages that exist or have existed were designed precisely for what and when they were needed. At its core programming is about appropriate abstraction. To be widely useful the programming language's wheels should tread lightly, just touching the road. If there's too much abstraction, there's no friction and you go nowhere. With too little abstraction you're pegged to the ground and expend enormous amounts of energy to go anywhere.

kd1220 15y ago

And we will likely never get there. A good place to start reasoning about programming languages is the philosophy of language. Frege, Hume, Wittgenstein, Searle are some interesting figures in this space. Many language philosophers believe there are some basics of language that everyone grasps, and the particulars of a language evolve from necessity. Fortunately there is little agreement on what these basic elements are. This is what makes it interesting. "Evidence-based programming languages" won't solve anything by finding natural-language equivalents for difficult syntax. What natural language will these equivalents be created in? English, Japanese, Arabic? All languages? Will Japanese programmers share their code with English programmers by means of a Babel fish? The idea of a poorly designed language is nonsense. All languages that exist or have existed were designed precisely for what and when they were needed. At its core programming is about appropriate abstraction. To be widely useful the programming language's wheels should tread lightly, just touching the road. If there's too much abstraction, there's no friction and you go nowhere. With too little abstraction you're pegged to the ground and expend enormous amounts of energy to go anywhere.