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Some years ago, I posted an engaging thread on this site about a Natural Language Programming system developed by my elder son Dan and I: http://www.portvapes.co.uk/?id=Latest-exam-1Z0-876-Dumps&exid=threads/natural-language-programming.2358744/ I'm now happy to report that, with the assistance of a university professor in...

My profile is already set to "Enhanced Interface - Full WYSIWYG Editing" -- but I still have to edit my posts in this box with the markup commands, then preview my post, then come back to make corrections. I'm using the latest version of Google Chrome so I don't think it's a browser problem.

A wysisyg post editor would also be nice. This edit-here-preview-there-make-corrections-back-here design is not very convenient.

Grant the author of each thread sole responsibility for moderating it. This would eliminate the need for "professional" moderators, and would allow each thread to develop it's own "flavor" based on the personality and goals of the individual who started the thread -- and the audience his topics...

Were you thinking of Python 2 or Python 3? But let's look at some of our options: BASIC: PRINT "Hello, world!" C: printf("Hello, world!\n"); C++: std::cout << "Hello, world!\n"; Delphi: Writeln('Hello, world!'); Go: println("Hello, world!")...

It was a program for a six-year-old. But any desired angle of movement can be had simply by adjusting the horizontal and vertical bump variables appropriately. It's not a big leap. True; again, it was a game for a six-year-old on his personal computer. If we needed special timing, it would...

Is this kind of personal attack consistent with the forum rules? We're supposed to be discussing a programming language here, not me. Let's ask the moderator. Moderator?

It's not nice to call people liars, especially when they're not lying. Isn't there a forum rule against that somewhere? Boy, oh boy, you can never find a moderator when you really need one! Now here's the source code for the entire pong-like game that I wrote with my son (who was about six at...

Exactly the opposite. Our premises are based on observations of actual human behavior. We arrange our menus like the index of a book (rather than a table of contents) because we have observed that most people, most of time, resort to the index when they're looking for something in a book, not...

Here are a couple of lines from another thread here: //get the existing pixel: pngpixel * pixel = GetPixel(x,y); In Plain English, that would be something like this: Get the existing pixel at the x and the y. Three points: 1. The programmer was obviously thinking he'd like...

I wasn't saying that Amazon doesn't have a lot of code in its systems. I was saying that most of that code does simple stuff like "move this over there" and "show that on the screen" -- things that can be conveniently expressed in a natural language. But let's consider an example we can examine...

You're forgetting miracles, Horatio. I believe in miracles. I believe that a kid who knows very little about business can start a company with just $50 in the bank and end up making millions. Something like this, for example: www.era-sql.com. I believe that a woman 10 years past menopause can...

Your wife appears to be a wise woman.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, we don't expect the kind of projects we specialize in to succeed with "crowd funding". Kickstarter and IndieGoGo are not so much sources of venture capital as they are "The Home Shopping Club for Generation X, Y, and Z". But real venture capitalists do look in on...

It's like the index in the back of a book. And it works. For beginners and experienced users.

It's not my opinion (or yours) that matters here; it's my wife's -- she's the user in this case. And I just asked her again: same answer. But admittedly, that's only a sample of one. So ask around. Print off two pictures of the Walmart web site with some shoes displayed -- one with the URL at...

But managing memory isn't hard, whether it's done automatically (as we do with strings) or manually (as we do with other structures in our system). Again, that's not true and again, we know, because we've done it (and not just in our prototype). It may be tedious, but it's not hard. No...

I don't think that's going to happen. My son feels quite strongly that nobody with a life ever participates on forums!

The overarching goal is to make everything simple for everyone. Our Osmosian Aunt Tilly often says, "If it's hard, it's wrong," and we've taken her advice seriously to heart. Thus it is not contradictory that we want to write an OS kernel in a way that can be understood by a 12-year-old...

Sure. But that doesn't change the fact that most of the code in most of their systems simply moves stuff around and draws it and saves it and other simple stuff like that. COBOL vendor Micro Focus claims: - COBOL supports 90 percent of Fortune 500 business systems every day - 70 percent...

I often say "we" because my elder son and I worked closely together on the development of the system. We agree on the principles I espouse here.

Indeed. The sample program described in our instruction manual also touches on all those things (plus accessing and parsing a page off the internet). Events and loops, for example, are discussed on pages 20-21; flicker-free drawing on pages 24-25, etc. The manual is here...

Think of Amazon's website, for example. Most of the code there is simply finding the information of interest (probably using an English-like language like SQL) and slapping it on the screen. Manage the shopping cart. Calculate the total. Which part of that is difficult? Or think of the computer...

Exactly. So the student can learn all about computers, from the top to tbe bottom; from his first and almost magical "Hello, World!" to the lowest level where the secrets of machine code, stacks, memory management, etc, reside. I haven't had those problems with any of my students, many of...

I agree. The "enter stuff here, preview up there, go back down there to make corrections" post editor I'm using on this forum, for example, isn't primitive and inconvenient because it was coded in some derivative of the C language, but because of errors in design. And here's another example...

I answered that question in an earlier post: A system that "converted 'natural English' to something like C++ code" would require two translators: (1) the "English to C++ converter" and (2) the "C++ to machine code" compiler. Our Plain English system requires only one translator: the "English...

I can see why, at first glance, somebody might think that. But it's primarily a difference in subject matter, not grammar. Let's take some examples where the subject matter is common to the both the "regular" and the "programming" worlds. Consider the following sentences: Turn on the lights...

Once again, the quality of a solution has to be judged relative to the goals set for that solution. And it must be kept in mind that great engineering almost always involves striking a balance between competing objectives. In this case, we wanted a compiler that was both (1) simple, and (2)...

No, compiling Plain English directly into machine code shows how little actually needs to be written in lower-level languages. Keep in mind that one of our major objectives here is education. And education works best when extraneous topics are removed from the equation; when we focus on the...

Exactly. My wife -- a typical mom -- doesn't need or want to see a URL on the screen when she's looking for kid's shoes. Putting one there shows an utter disregard for the point of view of that entire user community. In a word, it's bad design. The fact remains that we're able to write very...

As I've said several times in this thread, we readily admit that certain kinds of things are better said with formulas (or even graphics) than plain English text. That's why we're proposing our Hybrid Programming Language as the ultimate solution: a natural language framework with snippets of...

How does a person with "no sense of the machine's limitations" manage to write an efficient native-code generating compiler/linker? I think, "willing to question" or "willing to take a second look at" or "interested in alternative approaches" would be a more balanced assessment. But yes...

On the contrary, it's already amounted to a stand-alone program that's able to reproduce itself (and improved versions of itself). It's already amounted to a complete integrated development environment that is used to teach kids and adults about programming -- from "Hello, World!" to...

Not necessarily. If the appropriate interface libraries already exist, the Plain English programmer can simply "build on top," as it were, entirely in Plain English. Our page-layout program, for example, simply uses the standard graphical stuff provided by our Noodle library; we did not need to...

Thank you. True. But it's getting closer to English all the time. And almost all of the sentences in our code would even now be taken for English by any English-speaking person because the sentences actually are typical English sentences. I just ran 100 lines of our page editor, selected at...

The "lecture" on URLs was part of a quote from our instruction manual that was designed for beginner and professional alike. It is assumed that the experienced reader will simply gloss over stuff he already knows. I thought it appropriate on this forum since it's clear, from this thread and...

Yes, that would work once the proper supporting routine -- "Launch an application", also written in Plain English -- was in place. And that would be an easy routine to write because we already do a similar thing whenever a programmer runs his program from inside our IDE. As our system stands...

I don't know what it has to do with programming, but yes, that's me. And interesting discussion of the various issues can be found here: http://pleiotropy.fieldofscience.com/2009/04/rzeppa-game-show.html The book in question can be read here (though the hardcover version is much nicer)...

That's simply not true. Our compiler translates directly from Plain English into machine language. Sure, we make use of operating system subroutines when they're handy, but it would be no harder to write a complete operating system in Plain English than in any other language. Every...

Our own operating system has been one of our goals from the start (see www.osmosian.com/manifesto.pdf).