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Re: New Programming Language - any ideas?

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Flag <michael.mustun@gmail.com> wrote:
> Remember the days writing just BEEP to get a beep? Or SOUND 440 to get 
> an A? Or just enter PLOT 10,10 to get a dot at 10,10 ?

I also remember well that by a typo you could easily format your
hard disk...

> There are many programming languages... Give me my simple BASIC back!

> Basically they are all more or less the same. See an example here:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_languages_(string_functions)

> Example: String manipulations
> -----------------------------

> Why is it so hard to just compare a string with another in some languages?
> Why do we need to write the same again and again for the same task in a 
> different language so different? (Actually the devil is in the details.)

> Very high Languages
> -------------------

> I also think about very high-languages like LiveCode (RunRev) 
> http://www.runrev.com/products/livecode/text-and-data-processing/

> where you write:

> put word 3 to 6 of "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." into 
> theVariable

> Compared with Java:

> String [] theWords = "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy 
> dog".split(" ");
> String theVariable = "";
> for(int i = 2; i <= 5; i++) {
> theVariable += theWords[i] + " ";
> }

I don't know Java and, while being not a Pythonista, I have
to use it quite a lot at the moment, so there you can do it
with

theWords = "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog."
theVariable = ' '.join(theWords.split(' ')[2:6])

or, one line shorter if the 'theWords' variable isn't needed:

theVariable = ' '.join("The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.".split()[2:6])

If prodded enough I probably alsoc ould do it in Perl in a
one- or two-liner.

> So the only thing here I can see with the so called high-languages is 
> that it is no assembly or machine code.

How well do you know the "so called high-languages"? And what
do you consider to be high-level?

> A new language
> So let's start a new one: (It's a quick and dirty hack right now.)

If I would have gotten a dollar for every time someone flouted
"the new programming language" that can replace all the others
in the last 25 years I would be a lot nearer to being a millio-
naire;-) And, for some reasons, "natural language" programming
languages always promised everything and the neighbors dog. but
never delivered. I leave answering the "why" as an exercise to
the readers;-)

> Hello World:

> http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~michael-mustun/cl/trunk/view/head:/hello.cl

> The basic idea is to get the best of some languages and put it into one.

And the result: stuff that looks as horrible unstructured as the
BASIC/bash mix this is probably concocted from...

> Some text string manipulations from SPITBOL, Snobol4.
> Some from Pascal: end.
> Some from R: plot(x,y)

What does this is supposed to mean?

> Some ideas from very high languages like LiveCode but I think coding is 
> not English or any other real spoken languages. (You will never tweet or 
> sing your source code ... but who knows... ;)

Some languages shine in certain problem domains but utterly fail
in all others. Some aren't too good in any special domain but, in
the grand total, are still better. That's why a lot of stuff
nowadays is written in different parts, using different lan-
guages for the sub-part where it is really useful, and the
whole thing wrapped together using one of the "bad" but less
specialized languages.

> More ideas
> ----------
> Why we write for an loop in some languages FOR, in some WHILE, LOOP or 
> whatever?

'while', 'do' and 'for' typically are for slightly different
situations ('do' when you need to loop at least once, 'while',
when you may have to skip the loop completely, and 'for' when the
loop needs some initialization and post-loop work)... And then
you have to consider that some people say 'Ja', 'others 'si',
and others 'oui', when they all want to express the same as
'yes' might have done (if they just would speak English as
you're used to it;-)

> If we had higher abstraction of such "high language" basics like IF, 
> LOOP, etc. who cares about a strange syntax?

"Strange syntax" is always the syntax you haven't gotten used
to. And define what you consider to be "higher abstraction".
Also take a look at functional languages - some of their ele-
ments are making it into more procedural languages since some
years and that is, IMHO, a good thing. But not necessarily
making the syntax easier to understand at the first glance;-)

                             Regards, Jens
-- 
  \   Jens Thoms Toerring  ___      jt@toerring.de
   \__________________________      http://toerring.de

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Thread

New Programming Language - any ideas? Flag <michael.mustun@gmail.com> - 2013-02-04 22:43 +0100
  Re: New Programming Language - any ideas? jt@toerring.de (Jens Thoms Toerring) - 2013-02-08 00:05 +0000
    Re: New Programming Language - any ideas? Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet@bsb.me.uk> - 2013-02-08 01:10 +0000
  Re: New Programming Language - any ideas? mertesthomas@gmail.com - 2013-02-08 04:23 -0800
    Re: New Programming Language - any ideas? Flag <michael.mustun@gmail.com> - 2013-02-08 22:02 +0100
  Re: New Programming Language - any ideas? "BartC" <bc@freeuk.com> - 2013-02-08 18:03 +0000
  Re: New Programming Language - any ideas? Daniel Pitts <newsgroup.nospam@virtualinfinity.net> - 2013-02-08 10:20 -0800
    Re: New Programming Language - any ideas? Flag <michael.mustun@gmail.com> - 2013-02-08 21:59 +0100
  Re: New Programming Language - any ideas? Rui Maciel <rui.maciel@gmail.com> - 2013-02-09 10:40 +0000

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