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Re:Side-by-side Nim and Go by skybrian on Friday April 10, 2015 @10:34AM (#9354566)
Measurement is a tricky problem. You wouldn't measure efficiency in various human languages by testing using people who don't know the language. Similarly we would need to use people who have a basic competency (at least) in the same computing language being tested.

But then you still need to adjust for skill levels, and that seems a bit circular.

I think we're far from being able to measure this accurately.

Re:Side-by-side Nim and Go by nailer on Friday April 10, 2015 @10:52AM (#9354708)
Assuming the people being tested are English speakers, code has key words, which are already in your native language, and symbols, which to some extent echo their use in English.

Japanese does not have key words that are already in English. This is why it's generally considered harder for an English speaking person to read Japanese than to read some simple code.

There are orders of magnitude more people who will program in future than which program now. We should absolutely design things around those people.

Edit for natedad: 100% of people that fixed a bug were non-programmers at some point.

Re:Side-by-side Nim and Go by skybrian on Friday April 10, 2015 @11:49AM (#9355094)
I agree that how easy something is to learn depends on what you're previously familiar with. English certainly helps. Also, if you're already comfortable with math then you'll be more comfortable with symbol manipulation.

But that's a separate question from how easy it is to use a language after you've already learned it. The studies to measure these questions would need to be designed differently.

On the other hand, these questions do overlap. People who know a language don't stop learning; they get better at using it with practice. Also, people who use a language occasionally need to switch gears going back to it and need to relearn things.

Re:Side-by-side Nim and Go by NateDad on Friday April 10, 2015 @10:48AM (#9354673)
+1 when non-programmers start fixing bugs, I'll worry about how hard it is for them to read the language.