50 years ago this year, under the headline 'Computer Languages Are In English', the September 14th 1960 edition of Electronics Weekly, carried the following story:
'Two new computer languages have been announced recently. Both consist of simple English phrases that machines will automatically translate into their own language and then act on.'
'The story continues:
'Computer instructions are usually written in numerical form. Unfortunately the use of figures causes a great deal of misapprehension among would-be users.'
'Preparation of instructions or programmes for many business and routine applications is tedious but not complex.'
'A number of organisations prefer to appoint 17 or 18 year-old school leavers as programmers. Most academically qualified people have often been found wanting, as versatility appears one of the criteria for success rather than mathematical ability.'
ELT (English language teaching) centred term, as in the English language teaching divisions of large publishing companies, ELT training, etc. Electronics
Someone once said "If you finally make a computer that can be programmed in English, you will find that programmers can't write English". The point was that programming isn't so much about language, but about a systematic thought process.
Additionally, English (as any natural language) is highly ambiguous and context dependent, which are bad properties for a programming language. So any "English" used as a programming language would have to be a well-defined unambiguous subset. Even so, people will try to use full English and will be frustrated when they get error messages (or, even worse, unexpected results).
Before reading the contents of the blog postting, I read the title to mean that programming languages are Anglocentric because they use English-language keywords. I would contend that this is not an advantage for English-speakers, as they would have a preconception about the meaning of these words, and when this doesn't fit the way the words are used in the programming language, it can lead to confusion. This is the same issue as using a subset of English as a programming language, though to a lesser extend. So I would say APL got it right: If the symbols used are without prior meaning, there will be fewer misconceptions.
As for the two languages mentioned in the blog, I guess one of them is COBOL, but I can't offhand guess what the second is. Algol doesn't quite seem to fit the bill.
It might have been LISP
Later on the Americans proved even they couldn't write in English by inventing C which eventually almost completely replaced the elegant PASCAL from Switzerland :-)
I agree completely with Torben Mogensen, every time I try to read a computer instruction manual I end up feeling like I've got dyslexia.
I agree with Torben about English being much to ambigious and context sensitive to be a computer programming language. Thus, the famous AI test of parsing the sentence, "Time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a bananna." Both "flies" and "like" have different meaning in the two pharases of the sentence.
Mike, even Wirth admitted that Pascal, which he designed as a teaching language, was not a good general purpose programming language. That's why he went on to invent Modula2 (and Oberon?). Pascal has its strengths, but it also has some serious weaknesses. For system level programming, I'll still take C.
George - yes PASCAL was originally a teaching language but HP extended it very well indeed for embedded and system level applications. Modula2 was Wirth's own next generation but never gained traction and C took over.
Of course at this time Microsoft were still using Basic as their internal system level language on some projects :-)
As a college student in the '60s, I used Fortran on an IBM 7090 (before the 360). Fortran was the first popular programing language (for scientists), and Grace Hopper's COBOL came a little later (for use in business).
COBOL 61 (c1960) and ALGOL 60 I would guess.
English based means using words rather than symbols or abbreviations. Cobol rather quaintly had full stops and sentences.
e.g.
ADD 1 TO WS-COUNT. (cobol)
i++; (c type languages)
i+=1 (vb)
And while the academic community may have gone for non-english, give me an english based language anyday. Most of the cost of any program is maintenance not development, so the more readable the better.
And as for the idiotic concept of case-sensitive languages - don't get me started.