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Quote: I wonder if they'll develop cyber rats with tiny frickin' laser beams mounted in their heads.
If it ain't sharks I'm not interested, (  by the way!)
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glennPattonWork wrote: If it ain't sharks I'm not interested
Well, you have to start small I guess, sharks can be expensive. If rats explode it's easier to clean up (Or sweep under the rug...) 
It was broke, so I fixed it.
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S Houghtelin wrote: I wonder if they'll develop cyber rats with tiny frickin' laser beams mounted in their heads.
I believe Wales is developing the world's first flying mouse. If you don't include bats.
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Interesting that the cat thought of it first. 
It was broke, so I fixed it.
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So it won't spoil my rats-and-cattle-prods hobby?
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Just spent the better part of two weeks trying to find a bug in a Linux bash script (missing ".") and I'm tired of looking for things like a missing equal sign in the middle of an C if statement, missing period in a PHP script, lower case variable name mixed with an upper case variable name, missing brace in a C++ object, undelared function or operator overloading....get my drift?...in other people's code. (Being the perfect programmer, I never make those kinds of mistakes! And I have swamp property if you're interested.)
All too many programming errors are occurring because programming languages, like C, C++, java, etc., trace their origins back to the days when terseness was a desirable quality.
Printing a program listing on an ASR 33 teletype at 10 CPS on a single threaded machine made using braces in C if statements instead of a clear if-then-else-endif highly desirable. (Remember the origins of C?) Those extra 9 characters took TIME to read in and to print out.
And then there's issues of language diversity. C, C++, PHP, Java, Javascript, HTML, CSS, SQL, and other languages--what works where?
So, here's a few of my thoughts: (And please don't be too anal about my examples--I really want to hear how programming languages could be advanced so that I can be more productive.)
Among other things, a New Programming Language should:
1) Be clear and obvious in describing the functionality of the module. The resulting code should almost be language like.
A sentence like "If (A equals 10) then print B as "xx.xx" else B = 0 end".
But, that statement might also be written in a more mathematical syntax (like Fortran) as "If (A = 10) then....". Note the "=" in the second statement does NOT have the implied assignment and resulting TRUE logical decision (Spent 6 months chasing THAT bug!).
2) The language should be portable.
The language should be executable as an interpreted, compiled, scripted or shell'ed running under most commonly available OS's and browsers.
Perhaps Interpreted for testing, Compiled for execution speed, scripted for portability or shell'ed for utility work. Take features from scripting languages like Powershell, bash, incorporate execution speed of C, objectivity of Java or C++ and put them under one roof.
Write a module that runs under IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Windows, Linux, BSD, OS X, or anything else.
3) The code should be almost self-documenting.
Nothing I hate worse than to have to go looking for the a type declaration, a variable definition, a function calling sequence, etc. I don't want to waste my time looking for what is really happening in "Function.Set.Rate(0)". I have spent waaay too much time chasing Other People's Problems only to find out that the Function does more (or less) than the name implies.
4) The language should be largely independent of the data definitions. Weak typing where appropriate, moderate or strong typing if I need it.
Declaring I as a variable means that it could be a string, integer or floating point number at any given time. Declaring I as an integer means that it is an integer and I don't care how many bytes are assigned to it. Declaring I as integer(4) means that I want exactly four bytes assigned to it.
5) The language should incorporate most commonly-used functionality.
Assigning an number value, I with a value 1234, to a string variable, S, would result in S becoming "1234" using commonly accepting promotion and formatting rules. If I want something different, I should be able to override the default with a statement such as "S = I as '00000'".
6) And, finally, it should be easily extensible.
Have a new data type or facility? Add the functionality in the underlying support, not as an set of facility dependent function calls.
As an example: Support for data base systems might be implemented in the language as "Open database 'my_db' as my_db_handle". And "Select my_db_set from my_db_handle where something = 123". Msql, mysql, postgres, etc., might each have their own DB specific implementations in the underlying function. I shouldn't have to care which db system is used.
This could be carried even further using a remote access construct such as 'Open my_db at url as my_db_handle'.
Adding a new database type should be transparent (to the degree possible) to the program.
Additionally, the language itself should be easily extensible for future technology. Example: If an new image-processing technology was to be developed, then the language itself should allow easy implementation of image processing.
These are just some of my thoughts. What's yours? Thoughts? Ideas? Suggestions?
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Yes--this is a step in the right direction. I'll look into it further.
Thanks
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Oooohhh!!!!
I'd rather be phishing!
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I'm pretty sure that you implied that I was cruel a while back when I was teasing Pete...
I sir, am not even in your league! I bow in your presence. 
Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. ~ George Washington
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cheers
Chris Maunder
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How long have you been waiting to trot that one out? That frickin' awesome.
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You beat me to it Chris. I read this title in CP daily news, & came rushing here to suggest the legendary Osmosian.
Great! You have a good memory too  .
Hail Osmo!
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy.
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This?[^]
[Edit]
On a less idiotic note, I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that natural language processing on a machine is impossible because it would break one of the Goedel incompleteness theorems. I think the argument goes the machine needs the language to be consistent to actually run on a machine. On the other hand the language must also be complete to express the full range of ideas you might be able to have. 
modified 21-May-14 11:16am.
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Even HTML defies this requirement 
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Keith Barrow wrote: I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that natural language processing on a machine is impossible because it would break one of the Goedel incompleteness theorems.
Tell that to the GrandNagUs. 
The report of my death was an exaggeration - Mark Twain
Simply Elegant Designs JimmyRopes Designs
I'm on-line therefore I am.
JimmyRopes
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So... what you want is a common business oriented language?
COBOL it is!
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It looked like a description of a BASIC to me 
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My thoughts exactly, except portability part.
I work in VB.NET, have weak typing, good descriptive code etc...
And recently I had a discussion with a colleague who prefers C# who espouses "real" programming, symbols instead of words for start/end of function etc...until we got to code review and I got to see:
while () {
...
...
if ()
{
...
...
break;
} // end if
...
} // end while
 I didn't call him on it, really
I intend to live forever. Or die trying.
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I admit I do this nowadays in Delphi (three cycle, a case and a try..except down) - and remember Excel VBA, as it wrote If after End for me, while the Delphi IDE is unable to do it for me
So long, VB haters...
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The brace matching of Visual Assist is good enough that I usually don't need to do this. However, I often comment the else node in larger if constructs to keep track of the conditions needed to get there. Something like this:
if (a > 0)
{
if (b > 0)
{
...
}
else {
...
}
}
else {
...
}
The good thing about pessimism is, that you are always either right or pleasently surprised.
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How about Cobol+?
Cobol, PL/1, etc., have a lot of nice features.
I like the tasking (multi-threading), resource management/control and arithmetic formula capabilities of PL/1.
I like the sentence-like structuring of COBOL.
What would a "new" language look like that incorporated this stuff?
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After two decades of cobol I am ready to chuck it out the window
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