Is there a human readable programming language? [closed]

Answer 1

AppleScript is pretty close to that, though that is obviously platform dependent.

Here's a script for opening iTunes and playing a playlist

tell application "iTunes"
    activate
    play playlist "Party Shuffle"
end tell

Source: AppleScript Examples

Answer 2

Do a google search for "natural language programming" and you'll find lots of information (including why this is a bad idea).

Answer 3

This was "the next big thing" around about the early 1980s and I spent much of my first couple of years as a a coder working in "NATURAL", which was the supposedly the best of the new crop of 4GLs (fourth generation languages) which were designed to make data access (in this case to an ADABAS database) human readable.

Of course it did absolutely nothing of the type. All we ended up with was verbose badly structured code. Both of these products are still around, but you've never heard of them, which sort of proves the what a dead end it was.

Actually at that period there appeared to be a general desire to move beyond 'programming' into some sort of 2001 inspired AI heaven. Oracle were really keen on code generation and I remember with some interest a product called 'the last one' that was being marketed to managers as a product that would automatically generate any program you wanted and make all your programming staff redundant. Seems not to have lived up to expectations ;-)

It's worth remembering to that SQL was originally marketed in some quarters as a way to allow management to directly query their data. I was even sent on a course to learn basic SQL (in a large national transport organization that ran on rails - the steel variety) where junior management types were included because they had plans to put basic query tools in their hands. What a disaster that was.

Maybe it might be different in 50 years, but at the current stage of play coding demands a certain clarity of thought and implementation which is best mediated through a dedicated syntax designed for those ends, not any approximation to a natural language which is unclear and ambiguous. The nearest approximation is possibly physics where the essence of the subject is in the mathematics used (think a programming language for physics) not verbose wordage.

ADDED

I was forgetting, apart from COBOL there was also PL/1, sometime credited with allowing NASA to put a man on the moon it was just as verbose as COBOL and tried even harder to be 'Manager-readable'. Which is why no-one has really heard of it now either :-)

Answer 4

Interesting question. Your question can be read as "Is there any programming language that is easily readable by humans?", OR ELSE as "Is there a human language that can be used for programming?". All the answers here have focused on the former, so let me try answering the latter.

Have you heard of Sanskrit? It is an ancient Indian language on which modern Indian languages like Hindi are based.

wiki/Sanskrit

I've been hearing for years that it is precise and complete enough to be used, as it is, as a high-level language on a computer. Ofcourse, you need a compiler to convert Sanskrit instructions to machine language. I know the script & yes, it is precise (entirely phonetic so you never have to ask "how do you spell that"), but I don't know the grammer well enough.

This is completeley anecdotal, so I don't vouch for the accuracy of this. Just wanted to share what I know regarding this. :-)

Answer 5

Clarity of Expression is important.

But Clarity of Thought is far, far more important.

Answer 6

Projects promoting programming in "natural language" are intrinsically doomed to fail.

-- Edsger W.Dijkstra, How do we tell truths that might hurt?