The Osmosian Order of Plain English Programmers

[Darren Dirt]

ROFL you gotta love Google's indexing engine... and egocentric searching

[Mr. Analog]

This is actually kind of cool. I'd like to see what it can do!

[Cova]

After your description I'm still not sure what it's all about, a programming language that bloats simple logical concepts with clunky English rules of grammar?

The trouble I see with ANY programming language that tries to be plain English can be summed up thusly:

Thus spake I:

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If I have apples and Johnny has less apples, give Johnny some of my apples until we have the same amount of apples.

In C:

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do
{
if (x > y)
{
x--;
y++;
}
}
until (x == y)

I could boil it down to this in C#:

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if (x > y)
x = y = ((x - y) / 2) + y;

Computer programming is algebra, not English. The two most painful languages I have to deal with from time to time are Visual Basic and COBOL. Both were initiated as languages that were to be as close to plain English as possible. Both fall well short of this.

Q.E.D.

P.S. That's the worst site design I've seen in a long time...

Just wanted to make a couple quick points...

1. Both of the above pieces of code (and actually the original problem statement) have a problem - what if the total number of apples is odd?

2. Ignoring that and assuming an even number, the C version could be shortened to:

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while((--x) - (++y));

though it would execute even faster if it was written without a loop, like the C# above.