[WikiEN-l] MediaWiki is getting a new programming language

[Matthew Brown]

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 11:08 AM, <WJhonson at aol.com> wrote:
> My point is and was that whatever is used to replace the current system,
> should be a language that is as English-like as possible.

I think there's a substantial body of knowledge that shows that a
surface English-like-ness doesn't actually make programming easier or
more accessible; in fact, because a programming language never does
support more than a tiny bit of English syntax, it actually makes it
harder to remember what English syntactic constructions are meaningful
in the language when other, equivalent syntaxes do not work.

What does make it easier to learn and comprehend include factors like
a simple and clean syntax and an ease of accessing the functionality
that's useful in the problem domain.

English-like syntax seems to be better as a /sales/ feature than a
learning one; it seems, before actually trying to learn it, that it
should be simpler.

I'd believed that you were implying that a general purpose scripting
language would be worse in terms of comprehensibility and
accessibility than the current templates+parser-functions language,
and boggling at that, but perhaps I misinterpreted you there.

In my opinion, ANY of the suggested alternates would be better in a
quite substantial and meaningful way than what we currently have, for
both programmers and non-programmers.

On the other hand, that doesn't mean that some solutions would not be
preferable to others, even if any of them is better than what we have
right now.

If I misunderstood you, which I think was quite likely, my apologies!

-Matt