Comment by laumars | Hacker News Reader

Comment by laumars | Hacker News Reader

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"Computer languages and “real” languages are actually very similar."

I really couldn't disagree with that more. Sure, some languages' syntax borrow English words (Python, Pascal, VB, etc), but that's such a minor similarity. Those words are completely arbitrary and the syntax could have been in Klingon for all the difference it would make to the compiler.

Computer languages are a maths language; albeit a very very dumbed down dialect of maths, but maths all the same.

I think the trap many web developers fall in is that PHP teaches some terrible programming practices (no variable declarations nor types, etc) and ANSI SQL isn't Turing complete, so feel that all other languages by extension are equally easy to grasp. However if you look at a number of other languages -particularly the ones with C-derived syntax- then it becomes painfully obvious that any similarities to human languages are just skin deep (which is lucky for me as I majorly suck at writing yet can code proficiently in around a dozen different computer languages).

Don't know why you felt it was necessary to take a dig at PHP, as if PHP is the cause of all bad web programming practices. Nowadays, PHP is very much evolved, and the abundance of mature frameworks have completely removed the most of the inconsistency issues.There are in fact variable declarations and types in PHP, there's even type-hinting to enforce types.

The fact of the matter is that many web developers fall into bad practices via laziness, copy & paste syndrome, regardless of whether the language they're using has strict types or not.

While I agree that a bad programmer will write bad code in any language -and visa versa- my point was that PHP doesn't enforce good practices thus allowing many less experienced developers to accidentally fall into easily avoided pitfalls (lets be honest, having to === to force type matching is just plain dumb). So by the time you've properly hardened your code, it's anything but pseudo-English - which was my point (ie programming languages are not similar to human languages).

Natural-language likeness, with all its weirdness and power, was an explicit design goal of Larry Wall's perl, a language which was instrumental in creating the WWW as we know it.

That may have been true for it's original goals, but as a UNIX developer who's primary language is Perl, I can assure you that the modern day implementation (read Perl 5.8+) is anything but pseudo-English.

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