Re: New symbolic/numeric/dynamic/intuitive programming language

From: davepar...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
... everyone, even children, already learn that the most logical
way to tell someone or something to write "Hello world!" is to say:
write "hello world!".

If I ask somebody to write something for me, I expect them to pick
up a pen or pencil and physically write it on a piece of paper. For
example, if I meet somebody and ask them to write their name and
e-mail address, I expect those two items of information to be
written on a piece of paper that I can carry home in my pocket or
backpack. I don't expect their face to light up with a visual
display of their name and e-mail address.

Flaming Thunder has an "interpreted" version called FTNotepad
that you can run directly from the internet (it's right on the home
page at www.flamingthunder.com).

I searched that Web page. There's no mention of "FTNotepad"
anywhere on that Web page, in fact the string "FTN" appears nowhere
there.

What it does when you press the "Run" button is compile in the
background, then run the compiled code, in a way that the user
never sees.

When I tell somebody to do something, I expect it to be done right
away, not wait until I press the RUN button on them somewhere. Did
you go to a school where each student had a RUN button on them, and
none of the students did anything the teather had said to do until
after the teacher pressed the particular student's RUN button?

Write "The wild ", animal, " ate ", yourname.

I don't recall ever seeing that particular syntax in elementary
school. It seems your wonderful new programming language isn't well
modeled after what students already learned after all.

For example, writing a C program to do general interval
arithmetic is non-trivial.

C is not a good example of a high-level programming language.
You are attacking a so-called "straw man".

Yes. They already know English: Write "Hello world!".

We're back to your mistaken example, where the English says to pick
up a pencil or pen and write that text on a piece of paper, but
your stupid programming language does no such thing, so the newbie
must learn the *new* meaning of the old words, i.e. must un-learn
what was learned in school as to what the words normally mean in
English. Psychological studies show it's more difficult to un-learn
something to replace with new meaning than to just learn something
new that doesn't mask something else previously known.

English is already taught in all the schools in the US.
Therefore, they already know most of what they need to use
Flaming Thunder.

Two problems:
- As I mentionned, they must un-learn the old meaning before they
can learn the new meaning of exactly the same syntax.
- What about the rest of the world where English isn't commonly known?
---------- +--+ +---+
/ | | | |
/| \ +--+ +---+
/ | \ | | | |
/ | +--+ +---+
| / |
| / _|
- Why should Chinese people need to learn the nitpicking stupid
details of English syntax, such as capital letter at start and
period at end of sentence, before they can write software?
(Wouldn't it be so much easier for *everyone* to just learn that
there are matching parentheses around each expression?)
(Even Chinese use parentheses sometimes nowadays!!)
(And the first word in each expression is the verb, everything
else are nouns, or noun-sub-expressions, that feed into that verb.)
(+ (interval 4.6 4.7) (interval 3.14 3.15))
(Looking up individual verbs in a English-Chinese dictionary is a lot
easier than trying to learn how to write foreign language syntax!)
.