https://www.forth.org/Ting/Forth-for-the-Complete-Idiot/Forth-for-the-Complete-Idiot.pdf#forth

[neauoire@merveilles.town]

@lritter No, no, this book is like a .. early "Learning X for idiots", the author says you don't need to rely on a language's high priests to learn how to do any one thing, the language will enable the average cretin to get where they want to go.

[lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@neauoire ok but that's just what i contest. the "cretins" that it might attract might still not be average enough.

[neauoire@merveilles.town]

@lritter oh you meant great as in accessible? If so, yeah, I'm not sure, it's hard to say. I have .. toughts

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@neauoire @lritter Relative to 1984 it might be accurate, however. Like BASIC is not really that easy. It's easy to learn but that's not the same as it being easy to do things in.

[neauoire@merveilles.town]

@mcc @lritter Have you ever come across this episode of Computer Chronicles? I think it still is true today X)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-31sZfPMzwQ

[algocompsynth@mastodon.social]

@neauoire @mcc @lritter Were you looking for the episode with Elizabeth Rather? I've got that filed away somewhere.

[neauoire@merveilles.town]

@AlgoCompSynth @mcc @lritter I have both, but I meant to share this segment when the guest says none of the standard programming languages are appropriate for the end user, not even BASIC.

[lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@neauoire @mcc heh. evergreen quote. but i like to think i'm about to crack it. might still take 1-2 years.

[neauoire@merveilles.town]

@lritter @mcc I can't wait to see what you come up with! The best contender I've ever come across is still this(fractran): https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/pocket_rewriting.html

I'm always on the lookout for even more distilled and approachable interfaces for computing.

[lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@neauoire @mcc the key is datalog. i saw an inkscape in there, a reactive game engine, a database system, the important bit is flattened composition, and a visualizable approach. hard to explain. i go entirely by intuition.

[algocompsynth@mastodon.social]

@neauoire @mcc @lritter Ah ... interesting. I was working as a Fortran and assembly programmer back then. They were right; I'd go one step further. There's no such thing as a "programming language appropriate for the end user." And there never can be because of the nature of computing.

[neauoire@merveilles.town]

@lritter @mcc I think you're right, datalog/parlog is what lead me there too. Keep it up, I love following your experiments toward that.

[algocompsynth@mastodon.social]

@neauoire @mcc @lritter That is precisely why there are application programmers - to provide end-user-appropriate tools so they don't *need* a programming language!

[lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@AlgoCompSynth @neauoire @mcc except with creative tools, sooner or later fixed function is not enough. word, excel, blender, they're all user-programmable.

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@neauoire @lritter @mcc I'll be honest, my recent discovery of Inform 7 has made me re-evaluate the possibility of natural languages for programming.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@oblomov @neauoire @lritter The thing is that programming is ultimately not about syntax but about framing what it is you want in an unambiguous way. The reason why slopcoding will always fail is that not only are you framing what you want ambiguously, the machine is incapable of interpreting it unambiguously. But the thing the slopcoders *want* is to be freed from the mental labor of deciding what it is they want. They want to make ambiguous requests and have it do the right thing anyway.

[lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@oblomov @neauoire @mcc just looked at some inform 7 code and it's a neat DSL. very consequently avoids special characters and, like SQL, goes by speech patterns people already know.

the question is if this suffices for problems that are better expressed in some kind of gentle mathematical notation.

[bob@feed.hella.cheap]

@mcc @oblomov @neauoire @lritter it's been possible to rigorously say what you want and have the computer find a program that does that for a long time. that's called program synthesis. you can even use a language model to make the optimizer that does this more efficient. no one seems to want that, they want to literally put a feature request written by a user at one end and get a program out the other

[bob@feed.hella.cheap]

@mcc @oblomov @neauoire @lritter really what they want, and I think this is true for most "AI" products, is to not have to take responsibility for making choices. most of the work of dealing with a bug report is making choices about what to do with it, the actual coding is comparatively easy.

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@mcc @neauoire @lritter Oh absolutely, I don't expect NPL to actually do anything for slopcoders. But I have a feeling, with some of the people I've been working with recently, that not having to learn a new syntax would be of non trivial help to them to help resolve any ambiguities, because the issue isn't so much with the reasoning as it is with translating it into the syntax. It is something I still have to actually test, though.