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I'm not a huge fan of languages that are too close to English - I think it's a bit of a leaky abstraction. There's still a strict formula you need use, just lik

I'm not a huge fan of languages that are too close to English - I think it's a bit of a leaky abstraction. There's still a strict formula you need use, just like any other programming language, but it seems to the programmer like it should work with slightly changed wording just like in English when in fact minor changes cause huge differences in the way the code is interpreted. It also gets pretty verbose depending on what it's doing.

sakjur 3y ago
We’re used to English being an abstract grammar, where mistakes minor don’t end up drastically changing the observer’s perception of what was said. Hyperscript allows some of that flexibility, ”my”, ”me”, and ”I” are pronouns used in place of ”this”. This should presumably let you build better (English) sentences that still works. Until someone decides that they want to use ”mine” instead, and something altogether different happens. Expanding the reliance on ”plain english” also risks hampering future development, since you’re mixing user-defined words with keywords in the same namespace. Taking ’mine’ as an example, would adding it to the language to fill out the first-person pronouns break existing scripts? That critique aside, I really like it when people try ideas like this and fiddle with our expectations of what programming should look like. Erlang use a combination of commas, semicolons, and dots for defining a single line, the end of a block, and the end of a function. I personally prefer that to our more common curly bracket or indentation-based control flows. Go’s upper- and lowercase visibility modifiers also come to mind. Whatever you personally end up thinking about things like that, to me it’s sort of the hacker mindset at play. I end up liking that playfulness even when the result is not my cup of tea.

sakjur 3y ago

We’re used to English being an abstract grammar, where mistakes minor don’t end up drastically changing the observer’s perception of what was said. Hyperscript allows some of that flexibility, ”my”, ”me”, and ”I” are pronouns used in place of ”this”. This should presumably let you build better (English) sentences that still works. Until someone decides that they want to use ”mine” instead, and something altogether different happens. Expanding the reliance on ”plain english” also risks hampering future development, since you’re mixing user-defined words with keywords in the same namespace. Taking ’mine’ as an example, would adding it to the language to fill out the first-person pronouns break existing scripts? That critique aside, I really like it when people try ideas like this and fiddle with our expectations of what programming should look like. Erlang use a combination of commas, semicolons, and dots for defining a single line, the end of a block, and the end of a function. I personally prefer that to our more common curly bracket or indentation-based control flows. Go’s upper- and lowercase visibility modifiers also come to mind. Whatever you personally end up thinking about things like that, to me it’s sort of the hacker mindset at play. I end up liking that playfulness even when the result is not my cup of tea.