Re: Do you believe that the Plain English language is better than Ruby language?

Em qua, 20 de fev de 2019 13:33, Paul Robinson <[email protected]> escreveu:

> On 20 Feb 2019, at 14:35, Quantum Robin <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > I asked to the Gerry Rzeppa, the Grand Negus of the Osmosian Order of
> Plain English Programmers:
>
>
> Ah, so your only contribution here, "Quantum Robin", is to conduct a
> flamewar by proxy? Can I ask that you please do not continue to do that?
>
>
> > What could possibly "make collaboration easier" than speaking to a
> fellow human in the shared natural language used for ordinary conversation?
>
>
> Based on the industry's experience of 70+ years: almost anything else, it
> turns out!
>
> Natural language is inherently loaded with misunderstanding and ambiguity
> (it's a feature, most humour, irony, poetry and cryptic crossword clues
> couldn't exist without them!), that results in potentially catastrophic
> errors in a software engineering context.
>
> This is why UML exists, even though we all wish it didn't. It's why
> automated test suites are an industry norm despite them being expensive to
> maintain. It's why good specification documents have tables and diagrams
> rather than stick to natural language, even though based on your argument,
> they are unnecessary.
>
> You seem to try and duck this problem in PE by demanding the programmer
> defines the language semantics first in order to narrow the scope of
> ambiguity.
>
> One problem with such an approach is that it would require a programmer to
> cognitively adjust when maintaining two programs written by two authors who
> have different meanings for the same word more so than they would in other
> languages.
>
> Sure, we have this in Ruby when it comes to class names being the same in
> two programs with different functionality within them, but this difference
> is explicit and clear, but for PE to remain truly "natural", such
> differences must be minimised and implicit. Anything less, and it's no
> longer a "natural language" approach, after all.
>
> "puts" might be an absurdly clunky shorthand for "Put on the screen" to
> your eyes, but at least it means exactly the same thing in every Ruby
> program I'm likely to ever have to pick up and maintain. Yet, 'Write
> "Hello" to the screen' in PE could mean different things if the author of
> the PE system I find myself in has changed the meaning of 'Write' or
> 'screen' in a way I had not anticipated.
>
> You don't seem to have perceived or encountered such problems yet, and I
> am going to guess that this might be because the only people to have
> produced and maintained a significant amount of code in your language seem
> to be you and your son.
>
> Take this into an enterprise code shop and see what they do with it, and
> you might learn a lot about human nature and problems with the language
> similar to the ones I have described.
>
> What I fear is that PE will fail the "maintainable at team scale" test
> rather quickly, and worse given the tone of your reply you will find fault
> in the team rather than in your language.
>
> Ironically for a language that seems to be borne out of a desire for
> empathy with the programmer, you may have designed an environment that is -
> completely unintentionally - passively hostile to them.
>
>
> > First, we don't "use a subset of English." Rather, we allow the
> programmer to precisely yet flexibly define whatever subset of English he
> deems suitable for his application and circumstances.
>
>
> Your rebuttal reduces to "we don't use a subset of English, we make the
> programmer define a subset of English".
>
> You haven't disproved my point, you've just made the whole idea even less
> attractive.
>
> What you've described is what we call in Ruby "meta programming" and those
> of us who are a certain age spend a lot of time asking colleagues to avoid
> it.
>
>
> > Except for Plain English, of course, which has the absolute minimum
> "cognition overhead"
>
>
> Based on your explanations and the source code that I have read, I do not
> believe this statement to be true beyond the point where a word is parsed
> at the surface level. Semantic and syntactic cognition seems to be harder
> in PE than any other programming language I know because as you've
> explained it, every word is defined differently in every program.
>
>
> > Short answer: Paul does not know Plain English, so he doesn't know what
> he is talking about.
>
>
> Indeed, my short answer to this response could - if I was going to be as
> equally insulting and flippant - be something like: Gerry does not know
> professional software engineering, so he doesn't know what he is talking
> about.
>
> Time to move on...
>
> Paul


Is Plain English a good programming language to teach basic programming
techniques?

If not, why the Plain English is not a good programming language to teach
basic programming techniques?


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