Computer History Museum 2018 Fellow: Guido van Rossum

Re:Computer History Museum 2018 Fellow: Guido van Rossum by elcapitan on Thursday February 22, 2018 @07:55AM (#16437199)

I'm not sure closeness to natural language is necessarily something you would want. I remember some super painful experiments with AppleScript (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleScript) 10 years ago, which really pushed me away from that ideal. The languageification of a programming language creates a lot of cruft.

    if the text returned of (display dialog "Username" default answer "") is userAns

Similar issues can be seen in some of the monstrosities created as ruby DSLs, for example in rspec

    expect(true).to eq true

where it becomes hard to understand what's actually going on.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Computer History Museum 2018 Fellow: Guido van Rossum by wolfgang42 on Thursday February 22, 2018 @01:18PM (#16439854)

HyperTalk came closer than anything else I'm aware of to this ideal:

    ask "Username"
    if it is "Harry" then put "Hi there, Harry!" into field Greeting
    else put "Hey, you're not Harry, you're" && it into field Greeting

[ Parent | on HN ]