Python is readable

[Nathan Rice]

On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 4:20 PM, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 6:55 AM, Nathan Rice
> <nathan.alexander.rice at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I think you'd find that these "non coders" would do very well if given
>> the ability to provide instructions in a natural, interactive way.
>> They are not failing us, we are failing them.
>
> The nearest thing to natural-language command of a computer is voice
> navigation, which is another science that's plenty old and yet still
> current (I first met it back in 1996 and it wasn't new then). You tell
> the computer what you want it to do, and it does it. Theoretically.
> The vocabulary's a lot smaller than all of English, of course, but
> that's not a problem. The problem is that it's really REALLY slow to
> try to get anything done in English, compared to a dedicated
> domain-specific language (in the case of typical OS voice navigation,
> the nearest equivalent would probably be a shell script).

I'm sure a ford truck would smoke a twin engine cessna if you compare
their speed on the ground.  Let the cessna fly and the ford doesn't
have a snowball's chance.

If you're navigating by going "cee dee space slash somefolder slash
some other folder slash some third folder slash semicolon emacs
somename dash some other name dash something dot something else dot
one" the analogy would be a boss telling his secretary to reserve him
a flight by saying "visit site xyz, click on this heading, scroll
halfway down, open this menu, select this destination, ..." instead of
"book me a flight to San Jose on the afternoon of the 23rd, and don't
spend more than $500".

> Totally. That's why we're all still programming in assembly language
> and doing our own memory management, because we would lose a lot of
> personal value if programming stopped being so difficult. If it
> weren't for all these silly new-fangled languages with their automatic
> garbage collection and higher order function handling, we would all be
> commanding much higher salaries.

Did you miss the fact that a 50 year old programming language (which
still closely resembles its original form) is basically tied for the
title of currently most popular, and the 3 languages following it are
both nominal and spiritual successors, with incremental improvements
in features but sharing a large portion of the design.  Programming
language designers purposefully try to make their language C-like,
because not being C-like disqualifies a language from consideration
for a HUGE portion of programmers, who cower at the naked feeling they
get imagining a world without curly braces.  Fear of change and the
unknown are brutal, and humans are cowardly creatures that will grasp
at whatever excuses they can find not to acknowledge their weaknesses.

I also mentioned previously, most developers are just trying to graft
shortcut after shortcut on to what is comfortable and familiar because
we're inherently lazy.

Additionally, I'm quite certain that when we finally do have a method
for programming/interacting with computers in a natural way, many
people invested in previous methods will make snarky comments about
how lame and stupid people using the new methods are, just like we saw
with command line/keyboard elitists who make fun of people who prefer
a mouse/gui, even though in most cases research showed that the people
using the mouse/gui actually got work done faster.  You can even look
at some comments on this thread for evidence of this.