Re:The Hypercard Legacy
by microtherion on Friday October 31, 2014 @01:00PM
(#8539785)
Some people used to call HyperTalk “Visual COBOL”
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Yes. You can write statements which are both valid HyperTalk and COBOL. This is not a good thing.
It went downhill from there:
Put field 2 of card 54 into field 5 of card 71
You could name fields, but it went visibly slower if you did.
There's visual programing, where you drag boxes around and connect them. This comes back every few years. Simple examples look great. Larger program are awful. Blender, the animation system, has a game development system like that. Programs are single huge, messy wiring diagrams. Programming requires lots of zooming and scrolling.
There's a reason that IC designers gave up schematics for VHDL.
If you want to see programming-as-carefully-formatted-English taken to the extreme, check out Inform 7, a system for writing interactive fiction. For example, here is the complete source of a game:
Anyone remember the cryptic document that _why posted in the form of a printer spool [1], years after his disappearance from programming? It was a sort of fictional, surrealist autobiography.
[1] http://www.scribd.com/doc/136875051/why-s-complete-printer-s...
I was grinning madly when I noticed -- in the part where he's exploring an island -- the page written in syntactically valid Inform 7.
Assuming:
> Put field 2 of card 54 into field 5 of card 71
Means (Pascalish pseudocode): > Card71[5] := card54[2]
Or, perhaps a likely C adoption: > cards[71][5] = cards[54][2]
I'm not so sure I think your example demonstrate how "bad" this is.