On 2021-09-14 17:01:40 -0400, Mladen Gogala wrote:
> On 9/14/21 15:57, Guyren Howe wrote:
> > Verbosity. Redundancy. Lack of orthogonality. Resemblance to English.
>
> Verbosity is a feature, as well as the resemblance to English. The language
> is meant to be understood by accountants. Once upon a time people were using
> something called "COmmon Business Oriented Language" which was also very
> verbose, for the same reason: it had to be understandable to the business
> people.
Let's rephrase that: Back in the 1960s people thought programming would
be easier (programs easier to understand and to write) if the syntax
looked similar to English prose.
That belief was mistaken. While a very simple COBOL program may be
readable for a layperson (while even a very simple C program is not, and
a Haskell or APL program looks like complete gibberish), they still
can't write it, and even the readability advantage quickly vanishes for
more complex programs, because while COBOL may look like English, it
isn't.
SQL is significantly younger than COBOL but its design was led by the
same belief that making the language look like ordinary English would
make it easy to learn.
(It also wasn't the last. A few years back I saw a language for
specifying test cases designed for "ordinary people". Again, it looked
like English, but wasn't).
Superficial syntax is in my experience the smallest hurdle. It's
semantics that people struggle with.
hp
PS: COBOL is still in use.
--
_ | Peter J. Holzer | Story must make more sense than reality.
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| | | hjp@hjp.at | -- Charles Stross, "Creative writing
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