OT: Is there a more English-like Programming language than Transcript?

[Richmond Mathewson]

I always find claims that any computer language is more like English than another rather odd and, potentially misleading.

Computers are not human beings, and our "Western" society is in the unfortunate grip of an extended metaphor that we (humans) are merely very sophisticated computers, and computers will, one day, behave just like humans. This metaphor is coming to be accepted, not as metaphor, but as some sort of fact.

But it is not a fact.

All computer languages are what they are; computer languages, and as such cannot do anything but resemble human languages in a superficial fashion (for starters, most human languages were not designed). To manipulated computers via a computer language requires an odd sort of non-human logic which must be learnt by any would-be programmer; and, while some languages attempt to obscure that, without that nothing really effective gets done.

I don't think xTalk is like English; what I do know is that, in some ways it is easier to achieve fairly spectacular results more rapidly than with a language like PASCAL. But, under the hood, its the same thing.

sincerely, Richmond Mathewson
 
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"Philosophical problems are confusions arising owing to the fluidity of meanings users attach to words and phrases."
                                       Mathewson, 2006
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