Is Transcript's English orientation a plus or minus?

[jbv]

Rob Cozens a *crit :

> Is there something inherently inferior about a programming
> environment that can be used productively by someone who doesn't have
> a degree in computer science?
>
> Do professional developers feel threatened by the concept of business
> people writing custom software to drive their business without
> employing a programmer to assist or do the job for them?
>
> As a professional with 30 years in the field, I am IMPRESSED that
> people like local MUG HyperCard SIG member, Carl Chaney, could write
> functional work order processing, invoicing, & tax reconciliation
> software for his laser engraving business and a point of sale system
> for his daughter's ice cream parlor in HyperTalk without taking one
> programming course and without even any experience using a
> spreadsheet.  Sure his work looked "beginner-ish"; BUT IT DID THE JOB
> HE WANTED DONE.
>
> Does the fact that Carl Chaney could do that in X-Talk, does that
> mean, a priori, that X-Talk is an inferior development environment?

Well, although these are serious questions raising interesting problems,
IMHO
they don't fully cover the topic...

No doubt that HC (and especially the Xtalk syntax) was developped by
Apple
in the same "plug & play" and "user friendly" spirit as the Macintosh.
But having a prog. tool allowing to code in a syntax closed to natural
english
doesn't prevent to learn such concepts as variables (local vs global),
loops,
arrays, functions, handlers, sending messages, passing parameters, etc.
All of those being typical computer science concept. The fact that X-talk

syntax is far less cryptic than C syntax helps a lot in learning those
concepts,
especially because one can focus on the concepts themselves without being

bothered by any cryptic syntax.
But OTOH I've seen several custom projects developped with HC or OMO
by non professional programmers : although these projects did (more or
less)
their work, they were totally awfull from a prof. point of view, mostly
because
it was clear that the above mentioned basic concepts hadn't been totally
understood
by the ppl who developped them, and often they had made choices and
written
code that was totally ridiculous, slow, uselessly complicated...
And if any of these projects had to be maintained or extended by someone
else,
the task was almost impossible, and it would be easier & cheaper to
re-write
everything from scratch.

So the question is rather : to which degree of complexity can a project
be
developped in X-talk by someone without serious computer science bkground
?
To which degree the X-talk syntax isn't only a way to improve
productivity of
ppl with serious computer science knowledge, by allowing them to reach a
greater complexity in their projects in less time and with less lines of
code than,
say, C or Java ?

JB