this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024
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And very old. Part of the sales pitch for the COmmon Business-Protected Language was that anyone could learn to code in almost plain English.
Also, the stuff they wind up making is the kind of stuff that people with no coding experience make. Cooking up an ugly website with terrible performance and security isn't much harder than making an ugly presentation with lots of WordArt. But it never was, either.
Between COBOL and LLM-enhanced "low code" we had other stuff, like that infamous product from MS that produced terrible HTML. At this point I can't even recall what it was called. The SharePoint editor maybe?
Even SQL was originally called SEQUEL, Structured English QUEry Language. They got sued for the name and changed it to SQL. It was also pitched to retrieve data with plain language.
FrontPage?
Microsoft Frontpage?
The first complete program I ever wrote was in Basic. It took an input number and rounded it to the 10s or 100s digit. I had learned just enough to get it running. It was using strings and a bunch of if statements, so it didn't work for more than 3 digit numbers. I didn't learn about modulo operations until later.
In all honesty, I'm still pretty proud of it, I was in 4th or 5th grade after all 😂. I've now been programming for 20+ years.
Even natural-language languages like Inform 7 require a little programming knowledge for when it hates you.
Hey, about out to an interactive fiction dude/dudette!
I programmed in TADS many years ago, but I want to learn and use inform, because I want a Z-code game like my timeless heroes at Infocom.
I'm not really into writing interactive fiction; I just tried it a little since it seemed neat. It turns out that I'm not great at coming up with things to write about, which makes it hard to actually write. Inform 7 makes some decisions that complicate using it with a programming background; I'm considering trying to write my own language for similar purposes (but different paradigms).