Python and Flaming Thunder

[John Machin]

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.  

IIRC the idea was so that managers could write programs in English. It 
failed because nobody could write a parser that would handle something 
like "The bottom line is that the stakeholder group requires the 
situation going forward to be such as to facilitate the variable known 
as x to provide the same outcome when stimulated by dereferencing as the 
variable known as y".