Autocoding project proposal.

[Peter Hansen]

Jonathan Hogg wrote:
> 
> "phil hunt" <philh at comuno.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> > Tim's problem is that he is very good at (probably inadvertently) rubbing
> > people up the wrong way. He also is a poor communicator -- it is often hard
> > to get at what he is driving at. He also has a strange attitude towards
> > others -- he wants them to do things for him, and at the same time
> > castigates them for being elitist and/or stupid.
> 
> Yes, I don't mean to feed the kooks, but I am genuinely interested in the
> kernel of truth in his rantings. The problem with programming languages is
> that, no matter how simple and easy to learn, they require the user to learn
> to program. You have to adapt to the computer, instead of the computer
> adapting to you.

Assuming that Timothy's concept involves having identified "the" nine
basic commands "that are in everything we do" (I even have a straight 
face as I write this...) and providing (as in, getting others to provide)
a framework for implementing these nine commands and interfacing them
to applications (which will all be upgraded "overnite" to support the
new framework), then is the premise that users will be able to 
manipulate applications in some way using this framework, because
the nine commands make it so much easier to use?

So rather than writing this:

    def count( file ):
        i = 0
        for line in file:
            i = i + 1
        return i

    count( open('foo.txt') )

...one would just write a single line of some kind?  What would 
it look like?  Let's assume it is slightly more complicated, maybe
as simple as this:

   select file
   input data
   select line-counting-application
   output data
   input result
   select display-application
   output result

Wow!  Revolutionary!  

Now what do you do if you want to display the number of
lines minus one? ....

(If this is too subtle for anyone, let me be more explicit:
there's a reason we have "programming languages" to program
computers.  Anything sufficiently sophisticated to do general-
purpose work, such as counting lines in files, doing a little
math, and displaying the results, is a programming language.

If you reduce that complexity to nine commands, you must of
necessity spend most of your time calling other applications
to do the real work for you, which means you have in essence
another programming language, but one very poorly designed
for the purpose and hard to understand.... rather like the
proponent of this whole concept!)

-Peter