Brief Report - "Plain English Compiler" First Impressions
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In response to the ongoing debate regarding the appropriateness of the Plain English Compiler articles, I've requested and received a free copy of the compiler/IDE, available for purchase at the respective website for $100. As such, I'm going to report my first impressions (have to be brief, I actually have to study for my Friday exam at some point :P). The demo was sent immediately, and checked clean for malware/spyware (as some people were suspicious of). It included documentation and some sample programs, including the "plain english" source code for the compiler itself, which compiled and ran successfully. Unfortunately, I question the value of this product for professional programmers. Everything about it indicates this is a "proof-of-concept" project, and not a polished final product. The documentation and the IDE are simply not up to professional standards, and the language structure is questionable. The language syntax certainly appears to be English, loosely wrapped around Win32. The documentation uses cutsey, unintimidating language geared to a beginner, and frankly, the IDE reflects certain assumptions about the incompetence of the user: there is no stand-alone command-line compiler option as far as I could tell, and (among other things) the IDE runs full-screen and AFAIK, cannot be windowed, which makes multitasking a chore and just pisses me right off. The font they use looks like Comic Sans MS. Unintimidating, sure. Annoying, definitely. More importantly, several notable features draw the strength of the language into question: From the documentation:
- I don't do nested IFs - I don't do nested LOOPs - I don't do OBJECTS - I don't do REAL NUMBERS - I don't do EQUATIONSNow, some of this isn't necessarily a direct weakness of the language, particularly if we're trying to facilitate a paradigm shift. They claim that "Objects suck - we have limited record support, but the page editor should do just fine." Okay: but no equations? No real numbers? You CANNOT market a professional programming product without floating point support. They even go so far as to vaguely imply that people should stop being "math-heads." I'm not kidding.- No case sensitivityAside: I generally find this more frustrating than helpful.- "I don't care where you put your definitions"This may seem like a feature, but IMO, it's a weakness, because in large, complex programs, you're going to be hunting down your definitions when you gVB I miss you! The tigress is here :-D
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In response to the ongoing debate regarding the appropriateness of the Plain English Compiler articles, I've requested and received a free copy of the compiler/IDE, available for purchase at the respective website for $100. As such, I'm going to report my first impressions (have to be brief, I actually have to study for my Friday exam at some point :P). The demo was sent immediately, and checked clean for malware/spyware (as some people were suspicious of). It included documentation and some sample programs, including the "plain english" source code for the compiler itself, which compiled and ran successfully. Unfortunately, I question the value of this product for professional programmers. Everything about it indicates this is a "proof-of-concept" project, and not a polished final product. The documentation and the IDE are simply not up to professional standards, and the language structure is questionable. The language syntax certainly appears to be English, loosely wrapped around Win32. The documentation uses cutsey, unintimidating language geared to a beginner, and frankly, the IDE reflects certain assumptions about the incompetence of the user: there is no stand-alone command-line compiler option as far as I could tell, and (among other things) the IDE runs full-screen and AFAIK, cannot be windowed, which makes multitasking a chore and just pisses me right off. The font they use looks like Comic Sans MS. Unintimidating, sure. Annoying, definitely. More importantly, several notable features draw the strength of the language into question: From the documentation:
- I don't do nested IFs - I don't do nested LOOPs - I don't do OBJECTS - I don't do REAL NUMBERS - I don't do EQUATIONSNow, some of this isn't necessarily a direct weakness of the language, particularly if we're trying to facilitate a paradigm shift. They claim that "Objects suck - we have limited record support, but the page editor should do just fine." Okay: but no equations? No real numbers? You CANNOT market a professional programming product without floating point support. They even go so far as to vaguely imply that people should stop being "math-heads." I'm not kidding.- No case sensitivityAside: I generally find this more frustrating than helpful.- "I don't care where you put your definitions"This may seem like a feature, but IMO, it's a weakness, because in large, complex programs, you're going to be hunting down your definitions when you gGreat post! Means I do not have to look at the product ;) Back in the day, I always wanted programming to move to point-and-click drag-and-drop style on a graphic screen and drop all the text. Oh well, one of these days ;) Rocky <>< Latest Post: SQL2005 Server Managemnet Studio timeouts! Blog: www.RockyMoore.com/TheCoder/[^]
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In response to the ongoing debate regarding the appropriateness of the Plain English Compiler articles, I've requested and received a free copy of the compiler/IDE, available for purchase at the respective website for $100. As such, I'm going to report my first impressions (have to be brief, I actually have to study for my Friday exam at some point :P). The demo was sent immediately, and checked clean for malware/spyware (as some people were suspicious of). It included documentation and some sample programs, including the "plain english" source code for the compiler itself, which compiled and ran successfully. Unfortunately, I question the value of this product for professional programmers. Everything about it indicates this is a "proof-of-concept" project, and not a polished final product. The documentation and the IDE are simply not up to professional standards, and the language structure is questionable. The language syntax certainly appears to be English, loosely wrapped around Win32. The documentation uses cutsey, unintimidating language geared to a beginner, and frankly, the IDE reflects certain assumptions about the incompetence of the user: there is no stand-alone command-line compiler option as far as I could tell, and (among other things) the IDE runs full-screen and AFAIK, cannot be windowed, which makes multitasking a chore and just pisses me right off. The font they use looks like Comic Sans MS. Unintimidating, sure. Annoying, definitely. More importantly, several notable features draw the strength of the language into question: From the documentation:
- I don't do nested IFs - I don't do nested LOOPs - I don't do OBJECTS - I don't do REAL NUMBERS - I don't do EQUATIONSNow, some of this isn't necessarily a direct weakness of the language, particularly if we're trying to facilitate a paradigm shift. They claim that "Objects suck - we have limited record support, but the page editor should do just fine." Okay: but no equations? No real numbers? You CANNOT market a professional programming product without floating point support. They even go so far as to vaguely imply that people should stop being "math-heads." I'm not kidding.- No case sensitivityAside: I generally find this more frustrating than helpful.- "I don't care where you put your definitions"This may seem like a feature, but IMO, it's a weakness, because in large, complex programs, you're going to be hunting down your definitions when you gFisticuffs wrote:
From the documentation: - I don't do nested IFs - I don't do nested LOOPs - I don't do OBJECTS - I don't do REAL NUMBERS - I don't do EQUATIONS
Quack quack THUD! (It's a dead duck then) The tigress is here :-D
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In response to the ongoing debate regarding the appropriateness of the Plain English Compiler articles, I've requested and received a free copy of the compiler/IDE, available for purchase at the respective website for $100. As such, I'm going to report my first impressions (have to be brief, I actually have to study for my Friday exam at some point :P). The demo was sent immediately, and checked clean for malware/spyware (as some people were suspicious of). It included documentation and some sample programs, including the "plain english" source code for the compiler itself, which compiled and ran successfully. Unfortunately, I question the value of this product for professional programmers. Everything about it indicates this is a "proof-of-concept" project, and not a polished final product. The documentation and the IDE are simply not up to professional standards, and the language structure is questionable. The language syntax certainly appears to be English, loosely wrapped around Win32. The documentation uses cutsey, unintimidating language geared to a beginner, and frankly, the IDE reflects certain assumptions about the incompetence of the user: there is no stand-alone command-line compiler option as far as I could tell, and (among other things) the IDE runs full-screen and AFAIK, cannot be windowed, which makes multitasking a chore and just pisses me right off. The font they use looks like Comic Sans MS. Unintimidating, sure. Annoying, definitely. More importantly, several notable features draw the strength of the language into question: From the documentation:
- I don't do nested IFs - I don't do nested LOOPs - I don't do OBJECTS - I don't do REAL NUMBERS - I don't do EQUATIONSNow, some of this isn't necessarily a direct weakness of the language, particularly if we're trying to facilitate a paradigm shift. They claim that "Objects suck - we have limited record support, but the page editor should do just fine." Okay: but no equations? No real numbers? You CANNOT market a professional programming product without floating point support. They even go so far as to vaguely imply that people should stop being "math-heads." I'm not kidding.- No case sensitivityAside: I generally find this more frustrating than helpful.- "I don't care where you put your definitions"This may seem like a feature, but IMO, it's a weakness, because in large, complex programs, you're going to be hunting down your definitions when you gThat compiler sounds like something to help turn non-programmers into programmers. Maybe we should send it to India... ------- sig starts "I've heard some drivers saying, 'We're going too fast here...'. If you're not here to race, go the hell home - don't come here and grumble about going too fast. Why don't you tie a kerosene rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt "...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001
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That compiler sounds like something to help turn non-programmers into programmers. Maybe we should send it to India... ------- sig starts "I've heard some drivers saying, 'We're going too fast here...'. If you're not here to race, go the hell home - don't come here and grumble about going too fast. Why don't you tie a kerosene rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt "...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001
John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
That compiler sounds like something to help turn non-programmers into programmers. Maybe we should send it to India...
Wouldn't that need it to support Hindi then? :rolleyes: Regards, Nish
Nish’s thoughts on MFC, C++/CLI and .NET (my blog)
The Ultimate Grid - The #1 MFC grid out there! -
VB I miss you! The tigress is here :-D
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In response to the ongoing debate regarding the appropriateness of the Plain English Compiler articles, I've requested and received a free copy of the compiler/IDE, available for purchase at the respective website for $100. As such, I'm going to report my first impressions (have to be brief, I actually have to study for my Friday exam at some point :P). The demo was sent immediately, and checked clean for malware/spyware (as some people were suspicious of). It included documentation and some sample programs, including the "plain english" source code for the compiler itself, which compiled and ran successfully. Unfortunately, I question the value of this product for professional programmers. Everything about it indicates this is a "proof-of-concept" project, and not a polished final product. The documentation and the IDE are simply not up to professional standards, and the language structure is questionable. The language syntax certainly appears to be English, loosely wrapped around Win32. The documentation uses cutsey, unintimidating language geared to a beginner, and frankly, the IDE reflects certain assumptions about the incompetence of the user: there is no stand-alone command-line compiler option as far as I could tell, and (among other things) the IDE runs full-screen and AFAIK, cannot be windowed, which makes multitasking a chore and just pisses me right off. The font they use looks like Comic Sans MS. Unintimidating, sure. Annoying, definitely. More importantly, several notable features draw the strength of the language into question: From the documentation:
- I don't do nested IFs - I don't do nested LOOPs - I don't do OBJECTS - I don't do REAL NUMBERS - I don't do EQUATIONSNow, some of this isn't necessarily a direct weakness of the language, particularly if we're trying to facilitate a paradigm shift. They claim that "Objects suck - we have limited record support, but the page editor should do just fine." Okay: but no equations? No real numbers? You CANNOT market a professional programming product without floating point support. They even go so far as to vaguely imply that people should stop being "math-heads." I'm not kidding.- No case sensitivityAside: I generally find this more frustrating than helpful.- "I don't care where you put your definitions"This may seem like a feature, but IMO, it's a weakness, because in large, complex programs, you're going to be hunting down your definitions when you gNicely done. My Programming Library C#, C# Run
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That compiler sounds like something to help turn non-programmers into programmers. Maybe we should send it to India... ------- sig starts "I've heard some drivers saying, 'We're going too fast here...'. If you're not here to race, go the hell home - don't come here and grumble about going too fast. Why don't you tie a kerosene rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt "...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001
John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
That compiler sounds like something to help turn non-programmers into programmers.
Microsoft already invented that before.... it's called Visual Basic! :-D -- LuisR
Luis Alonso Ramos Intelectix - Chihuahua, Mexico Not much here: My CP Blog!
The amount of sleep the average person needs is five more minutes. -- Vikram A Punathambekar, Aug. 11, 2005
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It's an interesting idea. I just played around with it too (so, hmm, the lounge post actually seemed to work). Floating point support is done by rational numbers, BTW. What I'm intrigued by is, for example, I have some really complex code that handles auto-generating SQL. It's complex enough that every single line of code has a comment describing what it does. There's a sort of redundancy there, and in fact, I often wish that I could code simply by writing the comments! This is sort of like that, I think. And oddly, it's reminiscent of something I tried a long time ago on a Commodore PET/64, when I was doing pretty much assembly language programming, and thinking, why can't I just express my thoughts in plain English? So yeah, variable definition, declaration, and assignment is ridiculously verbose. But the real power of something like this comes to play when expressing higher level concepts, that are built on lower level concepts. Whether this program actually succeeds at that, or is simply a glorified macro compiler, I don't know yet. [edit]And yes, the articles as they stand are inappropriate. But inappropriate to the point of deleting them? I'm not convinced of that, because I could argue the case that whatever the paradigm shift is, it IS interesting and has some worth.[/edit] Marc Pensieve Functional Entanglement vs. Code Entanglement Static Classes Make For Rigid Architectures -- modified at 0:53 Tuesday 7th March, 2006
Marc Clifton wrote:
And yes, the articles as they stand are inappropriate. But inappropriate to the point of deleting them? I'm not convinced of that, because I could argue the case that whatever the paradigm shift is, it IS interesting and has some worth
I hedge at paying $100 bucks to do something useful with the articles, so I'd vote to delete them. If he was giving this thing away for free as a tool to demonstrate his proof-of-concept article, I'd agree with keeping the stuff. RageInTheMachine9532 "...a pungent, ghastly, stinky piece of cheese!" -- The Roaming Gnome
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In response to the ongoing debate regarding the appropriateness of the Plain English Compiler articles, I've requested and received a free copy of the compiler/IDE, available for purchase at the respective website for $100. As such, I'm going to report my first impressions (have to be brief, I actually have to study for my Friday exam at some point :P). The demo was sent immediately, and checked clean for malware/spyware (as some people were suspicious of). It included documentation and some sample programs, including the "plain english" source code for the compiler itself, which compiled and ran successfully. Unfortunately, I question the value of this product for professional programmers. Everything about it indicates this is a "proof-of-concept" project, and not a polished final product. The documentation and the IDE are simply not up to professional standards, and the language structure is questionable. The language syntax certainly appears to be English, loosely wrapped around Win32. The documentation uses cutsey, unintimidating language geared to a beginner, and frankly, the IDE reflects certain assumptions about the incompetence of the user: there is no stand-alone command-line compiler option as far as I could tell, and (among other things) the IDE runs full-screen and AFAIK, cannot be windowed, which makes multitasking a chore and just pisses me right off. The font they use looks like Comic Sans MS. Unintimidating, sure. Annoying, definitely. More importantly, several notable features draw the strength of the language into question: From the documentation:
- I don't do nested IFs - I don't do nested LOOPs - I don't do OBJECTS - I don't do REAL NUMBERS - I don't do EQUATIONSNow, some of this isn't necessarily a direct weakness of the language, particularly if we're trying to facilitate a paradigm shift. They claim that "Objects suck - we have limited record support, but the page editor should do just fine." Okay: but no equations? No real numbers? You CANNOT market a professional programming product without floating point support. They even go so far as to vaguely imply that people should stop being "math-heads." I'm not kidding.- No case sensitivityAside: I generally find this more frustrating than helpful.- "I don't care where you put your definitions"This may seem like a feature, but IMO, it's a weakness, because in large, complex programs, you're going to be hunting down your definitions when you gMy impressions: There is compact, in a good, to the point way (Cish - mostly to the point anyway... some redundancy) There is verbose, in a good, more readable way (VB) And there is excessive verbosity... and i'd say plain english falls in this category ;P VB is almost english... think of things in a wee bit different order, get a bit more to the point, etc... seems that plain english just uses more syntax to do less :sigh: Still requires formatting things in a specific way, right? Even if it is somewhat flexible ... If it could take the specifications & make code out of it though... now that would be more impressive ;P
