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Comment by justinator | Hacker News Reader

I think the OP perhaps wants to look at Apple Script?

Yes, this proposal is basically AppleScript.

AppleScript is (relatively) easy for non-programmers to read and understand, because it is built on natural language.

Unfortunately AppleScript is a huge pain to write, because as a programming language it is still quite strict about what type of syntax it will accept. It also is fairly limited, because speccing a natural language programming vocabulary/grammar gets increasingly difficult as you start adding features.

As a result even the best AppleScript programs are not concise at all, with limited use of abstraction. Most AppleScript programs are cobbled together by copy/pasting code found on the internet, and are full of bugs.

In my experience, the problem people have with learning programming is not syntax or abstraction - it's thinking like the abstract machine. Or in other words, understanding that having an array and a loop in your code isn't enough to make the computer understand and do what you want.

Basically, the thing that the PB&J exact instructions challenge teaches.

It's interesting you mention an array and a loop, because those can be separate abstractions too.

no need to think about loops: array.each {|x| puts x}

need think about loops: for i in 0...array.length do puts array[i] end

The first example saves you from thinking about indexing; arrays and loops are relevant in both.

The OP wants a modernized COBOL.

In fact, that's what they say after clicking the buttons at the bottom - which are actually part of the article.

Actually not if one reads carefully.

Well all right, they don't really want COBOL - they're saying that that's what they were describing as something they wanted.

But my point was primarily that people probably missed that they had to click the buttons to read that.

As far as I can tell, the OP wants people to stop inventing languages and "just write good code". They're deliberately describing COBOL as exciting, new and modern to make their point.

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