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

[Richmond Mathewson]

jbv wrote "I hope I won't trigger any flame war"

OOH, Goody, Goody, Goody, Let's have a flame war!  Frankly, I wear long-trousers nowadays, so prefer civilized discussion :)

"no human language exists per se in nature. no human language popped-up out of nowhere."

I feel I may be hanged for something I didn't write :)  I did not state that human languages popped out of nowhere:-

[Maybe they were breathed out of the nostrils of Lord Brahma at the start of the Maha Kalpa ???]

I stated that they were not DESIGNED (excluding Esperanto and "value-pack"), but EVOLVED. 
I know that good folks like Jonathan Swift tried to set up an English Academy to manipulate English; 
I am also aware of the foul murder of the circonflex by l'Academie Francaise and the destruction 
of the male gender in Nederlaans and Vlaams. Here in Bulgaria, the communists managed to castrate
the Bulgarian alphabet in such a way as to alter the way many words are pronounced.
As an EFL teacher I am acutely conscious, on a daily basis, of the ongoing tension between 
Prescriptivism and "How English Is Spoke". But humans love mucking around with things that have 
developed naturally.

However, xTalk's "seed" was "breathed out of the nostrils" of Bill Atkinson and his chums. Subsequently
people working with SuperCard, MetaCard and RR have altered and augmented HyperTalk, and a variety
of "dialects" have arisen.

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The main thrust of my previous message was not to point out the above (which should be fairly obvious!),
BUT to point out that the global extension of the "Computer = Human" metaphor is rather destructive; and
that there might be a dangerous tendency associated with it insofar as an "English-like" computer language
could give the impression that one was having a 'chat' with a computer, rather than programming it.

Humans, unlike computers, can interpret things. Computers, unlike humans, do exactly what you instruct them to do. Phrases such as "the computer does not understand me" are simply anthropomorphisms.

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Sorry, Flame War is OFF!

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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