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The English-Likeness MonsterI thought that denizens would be interested in this post by John Gruber about the problems caused by the notion that making Applescript syntax work like English would lead to a friendlier language: http://daringfireball.net/2005/09/englishlikeness_monster Besides Cobol and Perl are there any other languages where the designers felt that making the syntax resemble English (an evolved rather than designed language with legacy syntactic structures stretching back thousands of years and a history of ambiguous usage) was a good idea? Surely someone must have done some research showing why this usually leads to languages that are harder to work? This raises some interesting questions about the ways in which language design happens. Should we be paying more attention to the choice of syntax (even though semantics matters I'd claim that in most of the languages used by the vast majority of people the scoping rules and type systems don't wander out of a narrow range of options) and using syntax lists such as this one: http://merd.sourceforge.net/pixel/language-study/syntax-across-languages/ compiled as part of the Merd language project? By ade_oshineye at 2005-10-01 14:10 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 9371 reads
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