Python and Flaming Thunder

[MRAB]

On May 13, 6:32 pm, "D'Arcy J.M. Cain" <da... at druid.net> wrote:
> On Tue, 13 May 2008 19:57:10 +0300
> "Andrii V. Mishkovskyi" <misho... 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 once had to do a bit of scripting in AppleScript. The problem I
found was that AppleScript tries to be so much like natural English
that I never got a clear idea of whether something would be valid!