Python and Flaming Thunder

[Janzert]

D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote:
> On Tue, 13 May 2008 19:57:10 +0300
> "Andrii V. Mishkovskyi" <mishok13 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Not everybody has grown in English-speaking community, you know. And
>> knowing math quite good, I prefer writing "x = y" instead of "Set x to
>> y".
> 
> OMG!  It's COBOL.
> 
> Wasn't there an aborted attempt at writing a language based on English
> back in the sixties or seventies?  I seem to recall that it failed
> mainly because it turns out that programmers don't like to speak in
> English, even when it is their first language, to describe computer
> algorithms.  If that wasn't true then pseudocode would look a lot more
> like English than it does.  In fact, pseudocode tends to look a lot
> like Python.
> 

I don't always agree with him but I thought Dave Thomas' recent post[1] 
about 'natural language like' programming languages was pretty spot on. 
He is specifically talking about Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) but I 
think it applies to general programming languages just as well.

Janzert

1. http://pragdave.blogs.pragprog.com/pragdave/2008/03/the-language-in.html