Is Transcript's English orientation a plus or minus?

[Dan Shafer]

I've resisted comment as long as I can. It's torture.

Most of my feelings have been expressed by others, but there is one 
point that I think is perhaps under-appreciated.

The notion that we should add to the Transcript syntax to make the 
program less "beginnerish" (which I agree it isn't anyway except 
compared to the absolutely incomprehensible C and Perl languages, which 
I few as write-only) just because we *can* misses a key point.

A new person coming into the environment and looking for how to do 
something looks at scripts and docs. Unless you not only implement new 
and more complex syntax *in addition to* the regular syntax rather than 
instead of it, but also do not document it and discourage its use in 
scripts a newbie is likely to stumble over while learning, you still 
run the risk of alienating new programmers who look at the (let's face 
it) ugly C-like syntax and immediately head for REALBasic. The only 
other alternative, really, is to resort to levels or layers of access 
in a (generally futile but well-intended) effort to hide this stuff 
from people for whom it might be dangerous.

Nope. I'm with those who say to RunRev, "The syntax is beautiful. We 
don't care if 'real programmers' (whoever *they* are) think it's 
amateurish. We'll be happy to keep making a living by writing apps 
faster and cheaper than all those professionals do because we have a 
language that thinks like we do, not like the compiler does."

Dan out.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dan Shafer, Revolutionary
Author of  "Revolution: Software at the Speed of Thought"
http://www.revolutionpros.com for more info
Available at Runtime Revolution Store (http://www.runrev.com/RevPress)