English Like?

[Richard Gaskin]

William Prothero wrote:

 > When Director died, I looked around, held my nose, and jumped to
 > livecode, and now I’m glad I jumped that initial negative barrier.
 > But, I take exception to the many claims that livecode is
 > “english-like” (in spite of the many “english-like” commands),
 > especially if you want to do the advanced work that most of the users
 > do.

The team seems to share the same feeling; you'll find most references to 
"English-like" are historical.

LiveCode is readable, almost to the point of being self-documenting, and 
generally quite learnable,

But no language designed for communicating with a machine benefits much 
from from attempting to follow Chomsky rules for natural/accidental 
languages we use when communicating with humans; very different 
cognitive abilities in the listener, very different usage goals, leading 
to very different design patterns.

Your specific question is an interesting one in terms of syntax consistency:

 > For example, suppose I want to do the very basic task of coding a
 > conditional that test for the name of a card. What I would intuitively
 > expect is:
 >
 > put the name of this cd into cdName
 >
 > What I get for cdName is:  Suppose the name of the cd is theName
 > card “theName”
 >
 > Ok, now I only want the name, so I do
 >
 > if word 2 of the name of this cd is “theName” then
 >   —do my stuff
 > end if
 >
 > Nooooo, I don’t get that. First, I need to do:
 >
 > put word 2 of cdName into cdName
 > replace quote with “” in cdName
 > if word 2 of the name of this cd is “theName” then
 >   —do my stuff, this works
 > end if
 >
 > I don’t call this intuitive.  I just spent more time than I should
 > have sorting this out.

I'm afraid you'll have to blame the authors of the mother tongue, 
HyperTalk, on that one.

Your expectations a perfectly reasonable:  with most properties we ask 
for a value and we get that value, without also getting some other 
metadata like object type.

Imagine if:

   put the rect of button 1

...returned:

   rectangle "20,20,120,44"

That would be annoying as hell.  And yet with object names that's pretty 
much what happens, where we have to add more (an extra keyword) to get less:

   put the name of button 1

...yields:

   button "Bob"

But:

   put the short name of button 1

...yields:

   Bob

Fortunately most properties work as expected, and the anomalous behavior 
of the name property (and only a few others) are easily learned and 
quite useful.

But posts like yours are VERY helpful for those of us who teach 
newcomers.  When we've learned these things too long ago it's easy to 
forget they were ever unintuitive at first, which may miss opportunities 
for more effective on-boarding.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com