On Sep 13, 2012, at 11:02 AM, Patrick Shaw Stewart wrote: > Like most computer users and many scientists I don't write scripts to > organize or analyse my data unless I get desperate. I've used both Python > and Perl a few years ago, but it would take quite a lot of time and effort > and staring at on-line tutorials to get back into either of them right now. > So I end up using massive Excel files that kind of work, but are a pain. > I've noticed that quite a few structural biologists have the same problem. > > I've never understood why there can't be a simple programming language that > is completely self-explanatory bercause it uses English sentences.
Yeah. They tried that. It's called "AppleScript" and is a complete disaster for programmers simply because of its vague resemblance to natural language. There are essays on this issue [1, 2], but other than the message "stay away from programming languages that try to be natural languages", these essays are mostly academic. It turns out that the syntax and semantics of all reasonable programming languages are very similar, or fall into only a few classes (e.g. C-like, S-expressions, etc.), so once you are "fluent" in one from a class, it's easy to pick up the others. This can't be said of natural languages, which are full of idioms and grammatical exceptions, even in closely related dialects. James [1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/08/computer-languages-arent-human-languages.html [2] http://daringfireball.net/2005/09/englishlikeness_monster
