Is Transcript's English orientation a plus or minus?

[Kevin Miller]

On 11/2/04 12:27 am, Dan Shafer <revdan at danshafer.com> wrote:

> 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."

The syntax is neither amateurish, nor only for beginners.  The English-like
nature of our language is one of our product's key differentiators and is
appreciated by beginners and professionals alike.  If you have a lot of
programming experience background it make take a little getting used to.
However I've seen this pattern again and again: once you are used to it, you
don't tend to want to go back.

Not only would adding the ability to code in other ways be a huge use of
resources best spent fixing bugs and polishing the feature set, it would
remove one of our key benefits.  We believe programming should be like
creativity, like drawing or writing, not like arcane.  There is no inherent
reason that philosophy can't equally apply to the professional as to the
beginner.

No matter how used you get to C, PERL, Java, etc., at the end of the day,
code written in Transcript is a lot more readable.  We're not about to spend
time making our virtually self-commenting code like other programming
languages for no other reason than to be like other languages.

Kind regards,

Kevin 

Kevin Miller ~ kevin at runrev.com ~ http://www.runrev.com/
Runtime Revolution - User-Centric Development Tools