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Comment by groby_b | Hacker News Reader

That is not necessarily a sign of a good language, though.

ADD 1 TO COBOL GIVING COBOL

is also readable, and yet (thankfully!) we've mostly abandoned COBOL.

And no, I'm not saying Python is bad, or like COBOL - just that readability and quality of a language are not necessarily related.

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I don't think that "englishy" (COBOL, applescript) code is readable, and I bet many programmers agree.

Python is readable because its syntax is very close to many people's version of pseudocode. This is why non-Python programmers find it easy to read.

> Python is readable because its syntax is very close to many people's version of pseudocode

Or at least that is what Python developers seem to believe

I find Applescript quite readable, especially for its purpose, but it's a pain to write, because, unless you use it often, you never know which subset of English is valid.

I don't know that I agree, I really am not sure what "GIVING COBOL" means.

It's the assignment part; it says where the result should go. In this case, back to the "COBOL" variable. But, it's optional if you're assigning back to the source: ADD 1 TO COBOL means the same thing as ADD 1 TO COBOL GIVING COBOL. But, you can also do ADD 1 TO COBOL GIVING FOOBAR to assign it somewhere else.

(Yes, I just spent the last 10 minutes reading the COBOL pages on Wikipedia and Wikibooks.)

It's a COBOL joke. (And a bad one at that)

ADD 1 TO X GIVING Y is COBOL's way of saying y=x+1 ADD 1 TO COBOL GIVING COBOL is COBOL=COBOL+1. Or COBOL++ :)

Really? I've never coded in COBOL and it was pretty obvious straight away that it was an assignment.

Allegedly in the 80s software vendors sometimes advertised that their products were programmable/extensible in plain English. By which they meant BASIC.

I wasn't responding to a comment on language quality, I was responding to a comment on language readability.

Yes, but the GP was commenting that they'd never code in that, given the "ugliness". I'd love to reply to both posts as a set, but alas, it doesn't offer that.

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