Congratulations, you invented COBOL :D In all seriousness, as someone who tutored an introductory programming class, syntax is not a large hurdle for most; All students already have experience dealing with "weird"/rigid syntax (e.g. algebra, chemical equations). The hardest thing for most is the problem solving part: "how do I get from the problem description to a step-by-step solution?"
IMHO the problem is how variables are introduced, ie from the computer perspective, when really they represent concept not just memory. For example gravity hold a value but represent a force applied. When enunciating the problem, you can use the description to map directly to the smaller steps
Same, I've seen students understand what most of the commands in a language can do but their issue wasn't the tools in their hands but how to use it. They'd lack the ability to formulate a simple algorithm, even if I were to ask them to write it in plain english they'd still fail it. The problem rarely is the notation itself but one's ability to think logically and programmatically.
@@PecaCS Teach them basic logic. Boolean algebra, logic gates, argumentative logic, algorithm notation, flowcharts etc. And then make them think of as many algorithms as they can, make them solve problems and write the steps to solving it, provide tips, multiple solutions, show them how an algorithm often look like, teach them methods to solving problems such as divide and conquer, induction, deduction, trial and error, brute force etc, maybe even talk about big O notation briefly to introduce how to analyse algorithms, and maybe, just maybe, some of them will learn.
@@PecaCS And then that will teach them how to solve problems, however how to solve computable problems might still be a necessary leap for some. Hence teaching basic computer architecture might be just what they need to get it.
I don't know if this is a joke video, or if you are serious, but trying to remember all these phrases instead of simple keywords would be a real pain in the ass.
I had that shocking realization only halfway through the video... @stuwustudio High-level programming languages are made for humans (that's why compilers exist) and I don't see how this language is easier to read in any way
Cobol was originally created to be an english like language & because of that it was looked down on by many programmers even though it was very good for what it was designed to do
High level languages are optimised for human readability, hence the need for a compiler to machine code which is actually optimised for computer readability. The nature of programming is closer to math than to a recipe hence the comments explain the underlying maths behind the syntax.
@@PecaCS studying electronics, so assembly and c is used quite a bit. Hence when I switch from low level languages to high I lose lots of control for easier readability. but this cook book like language is like making a cook book like language for math(i.e. word problems) yes its possible but it brings ambiguity of language and unnecessary length. Also just a point, most of the time programmers try to abbreviate their names. A better method would be to make an auto generating pseudo code in a separate file.
@@PecaCS Irrelevant question. And something like Fortran is probably easier to understand while being much much faster to run (yes, including compile time) and write 😂
I think anyone who will use a language like this for a few hours will realize that writing, reading, let alone remembering long sentences is far more inefficient than it needs to be. So they will add "shortcuts" where instead of writing "define a function with 1 argument" you will just write "func 1" or something. So you'll end up with a regular programming language with extra steps. Maybe a better goal would be to have an IDE transform chunks of code, from a regular programming language, into an English description of what the chunk does. But that's only something that will show up in the editor after it's been written in the regular programming language. Not what the programmer writes, and not what the compiler reads. I can imagine AI being used for this but a deterministic, classical approach would be better. As an example: math, before algebra became what it is today, was extremely hard to work and solve problems with, because it used a lot of natural language. Today, anyone is free to use whatever "math language" they want. And yet we choose symbols over English because this is what the human brain is best at working with. We do use English, but only to describe at a high level what the symbols mean, after we've written them, so future people will be able to understand it easier. We don't replace the symbols with English. Maybe that's what we should do with programming as well. So basically computer generated comments which abstract away blocks of code, so it's easier to read, but not harder to write.
My goal with English+ is exactly that. Chunks of code are one english sentence. It will be the description of a function. And what the function does is also in plain english. There is no need for shortcuts, I made VS code extension that autocompletes while you type from your config. As I see it our views align.
I think this is brilliant but I agree with comments saying this could make understanding code more difficult. Though it's probably a matter of habit, I find it easier to read, write and understand code that looks like code and math functions than code that looks like recipes. This has a lot of potential though, I'm sure there's a sweet middle point in which the actual coding experience gets better for both experienced programmers and people who know nothing about programming and not much about maths
The most telling thing here is "I copy pasted the code snippets from a tutorial but I still.dudnt understand it". The mapping from concepts to syntax ought to happen in the student's brain - so any good tutorial should show you the basic syntax then describe what you need to build and leave it to the student to write the final code, otherwise you're just downloading sample code in sections
If the tutorials are not good all that I am left with is the documentation. English+ makes a good tutorial out of the documentation for when that’s all you currently have.
You still have to select which English words to use. Then you need to give each Word a meaning. Some words have three meaning. They already created such language and it's called COBOL. There will be a time when you program by talking as in Star Trek.
PERFORM VARYING count FROM 1 BY 1 UNTIL count IS GREATER THAN max-count MULTIPLY number BY count GIVING result ADD result TO total END-PERFORM. DIVIDE total BY number-1 GIVING number-2 REMAINDER number-3. PERFORM some-procedure 10 TIMES.
@@PecaCS - I believe you’re talking about a written version of what will be used in the 23rd century when computers can receive orders and commands to perform something, the way Commander Data of Star Trek does it in the year 2400. You’re on the right track. Your idea would be better for a talking programming language. People find COBOL too tedious and too long to write programs.
Its called python 😂 Edit: My comment could also apply to SQL and COBOL 2nd Edit: I didn't know I would cause a global programming languages war in the comments 😂
@@StarsOfMinecrafttr tell me you are a researcher with no other work experience without telling me you are a researcher with no other work experience. If it saves time for the engineers and developers to make a proof of concept of whatever, it is useful and, thus, great. You can improve the solution to other languages later. The greatness in python is not having to worry about random bullshit you don't care when experimenting something.
That is an interesting project. It is worth noting that English isn't completely devoid of the special characters we use in coding, though it does look more cryptic in code because they are much more common. Though you have languages like Lua which have a very nice balance. This could open the door to very fast programming because there are tools built for english such as the charachorder which make english much faster, but code not so much.
Making a programming language is always a good project for experience. Many people have already pointed out a lot of what I'd consider problems. But to expand on them: English has many words with different interpretations, hundreds of grammar rules, tenses, etc.. Are you expecting that different people will be able to understand long sentences the same way? Common programming languages have fewer than 50 keywords (e.g. C, Java, Python, Go, PHP). Some have up to 100 (e.g. C++, C#). The problem with long sentences is that at some point users of this language won't want to read or write it anymore. The benefit of cryptic text is - when you understand it, you can quickly scan the code and find what you need. It's easy to pick out variable declarations, assignments, function calls, conditions, loops, etc. when you know what to expect. And because this is significantly different from the average programming language, the programmer is not really learning a "proper" programming language. I don't really want to argue about gatekeeping. In reality, if someone can't handle learning the syntax, they probably can't handle programming. Longer text is also harder to keep in working memory. But the most glaring issue is that just because the text explains everything, it doesn't mean you can solve or even understand the problems you'll be working with. After all, you're still dealing with computers, their architecture, boolean arithmetic, the operating system, libraries and APIs, multithreading, algorithms of all kinds, etc. In the end, this is like writing numbers as "three hundred fifty seven million, five hundred fifteen thousand, eight hundred and one, point, five, eight, three, two", instead of 357515801.5832. But if anything, I'd recommend: - Making the syntax smaller, like "call Function with x, y, z", "for element in array", "for i from 0 to 10", "set x to 1 + y". - Probably use braces or parentheses for blocks, because indentation is horrible to organize. - Make some sort of way to write comments. I'd rather read "// Euler's algorithm" and then 50 lines of complex math code than a 1000 line novella about the intricacies of the algorithm. - Reading "Crafting Interpreters", there's a free online version of it.
I had an idea of creating a language with functions, which parameters can be placed anywhere in between the function name, e.g. Define: Sleep for (Seconds: Int) seconds { // ... } Sleep for 5 seconds; Maybe I should write a compiler for it
Going through the comments, I noticed that this person is quite inquisitive and is eager to learn more from folks who either genuinely, or snobbishly act like they, know more. Kudos to you, Sir.
Back in the day, math problems were described in long paragraphs of analogies, geometry, and what not. The Sir Isaac Newton invented the standardized algebra notation we use to day, and we never went back. There's a reason for that.
syntax doesn't matter unless you're a beginner, in which case you're most likely not doing anything substantial. Experienced engineers understand programming languages in the same way that they understand written text, what matters is the message (data structures and algorithms) behind it, not necessarily the actual words (implementation details like syntax) used.
So an experienced engineer can open any github repository and the syntax will not be problem? They will for sure need to go through the documentation of the language. What I am aiming for is for the dev to be able to understand on his first reading what is happening. I also agree that what matters is the message. We are on the same page with that part.
@@PecaCS The same issue may arise for users of English++ who are not native English speakers. Writing extensively about a text can be time-consuming, and beginners often find it more valuable to grasp the logic behind algorithms and data structures. Understanding how compilers and computers function takes precedence over syntax. What may take 10 minutes to write in C++ or JavaScript could extend to 15-20 minutes in English++.
@@PecaCS "So an experienced engineer can open any github repository and the syntax will not be problem? " Yes, 100%, yes! I've needed to go into large codebases blind many, many built with nearly all languages you can think of (imperative and declarative) Only on rare occasions is syntax something that will confuse me, the only exception is for languages with all of syntax sugar and idioms that I'm not specialized in. What takes time to understand these codebases are more abstract things like function call graphs, class management and architecture.
The thing is, code is in a weird syntax for the computer to understand, it's just that it's the standard, compilers could understand anything they are coded to understand
@@PecaCS they haven't though? and using symbols and keywords once learned is way more effective. integer var is set to 8 is way slower to write and read than int var = 8
I can see this being useful for generating documentation, like taking a more complex code file and compiling it into this language so you can compare them side by side to figure out what's going on. But for practical use, at least in my experience, I find myself having to work around the machine more than the machine has to work around me, but having a layer of abstraction is nice. So I'd rather the code syntax be a happy medium between plain english and machine code. But this is an interesting idea nonetheless!
I really like the video and think the idea is great, however the premise that programming languages are designed to be easy for computers and hard for people is completely backwards. That's why we have compilers, etc., they were made so that humans can easily interact with computers without having to manually edit memory or change 1s to 0s
I do believe this is quite an interesting project, but I see some glaring problems. This isn't meant to demotivate or insult your work, but rather as a neutral inquiry. - the main motivation behind english+ seems to be unreadability of normal code. What are the advantages of english+ here? All it seems to do is the same process but with longer statements. In my (personal) opinion, the hardest part of reading code is understanding what it's doing. This can already be explained by comments. Even with english+, each individual line might be more readable (to non programmers), but that does little to explain the underlying logic. - do you plan on making english+ a stepping stone or a full platform. if you plan on the latter, how do you plan on making code efficient?
I only showed a project made in a few days with English+. My theory is that when we start building modular blocks with the basic ones that are a long description, that’s where it will shine the most. I plan to build my next program entirely in English plus and see if it’s significantly different and better. Right now I just got the idea, got excited and quickly implemented it and tested out on a small game how it looks like. I plan to continue experimenting with it.
I think you have this wrong, coding's complexity doesn't come from its syntax, it comes from the problem solving. Like the other guy said, this is what comments are for. Also, if you continue this project, make it a C++ Transpiler instead of an Interpreted language like JS, it's faster and the code will be optimized by the C compiler.
I was thinking exactly this!! The only advantage I see is for newbies to learn the recipes and understand the fundamentals. After that, they might adapt easier to other languages
I'm shocked that I never thought that before. English+ is such a natural extension of abstraction. Programming already a huge abstraction: machine code -> assembly -> ... Thank you for the video, I'm currently working on English+ for Javascript :)
its decent for non programmers, but honestly, its way too long, heres some code they wrote (~1:41): - add image ('assets/dude.png') with specified frame width (32) and frame height (48) to current load queue of (the current scene) and upon success ad to the global Texture Manager, referenced with ('dude')
i remember trying to use skript and i hated it, i had to learn all these weird rules that were meant to make it more like english but just complicated things when you wanted to do something specific...
This is an interesting concept, but there is a reason why we write high-level code the way we do. Language grammar and syntax is tuned to the nature of the problem. It is concise and specific. English, or any natural language, would have too much filler, and if we remove all the filler, we probably end up again with what we already have for code. Of course there is large variation there and some is domain-specific. Code is akin to a mathematical formula and logical symbols. Think of rewriting every complex mathematical formula as a word problem and tell me which is more succinct, exact and legible.
When you're early into computerdev you naturally think you should make something like this, but when you actually get into the weeds you realize that there's nothing wrong with lower level programming and the fact it gatekeeps less experienced programmers is a good thing. You don't *want* people who don't know what they're doing to be able write things, because they're going to be low quality. Instead you want to make the process as painless for those who actually do know what they're doing. Perfect example of this is implicit type casting. In 90% of cases it does what you want it to do but that other 10% it can be insufferable that it decides for you what you want it to do when that's not what you want. Lua will cast every number to double, which leads to an infamous bug within the language where you'll add two numbers and end up with an unreasonable amount of trailing zeros. On the other end you have the crap C# does where if you don't explicitly cast a divisor as a float or double, it will do integer division. That's fucking annoying too.
The config files just make this a verbose translation layer to the same code anyway. "You'll understand the concepts better by reading the documentation and following tutorials in order to make the config" oh, you mean, like learning how to program? That's a wild idea. What's more, the english code here is not any more clear than ordinary syntax of high-level languages, because the description is much too low-level. Referencing the snippet at 2:24, if someone doesn't understand, for instance, platforms.append(createGameObject(x: 600, y: 400, texture: 'ground')), they won't understand your sentence any better. There is essentially no one who is confused by the micro-scale syntax of modern, high-level programming languages. The (often esoteric) logic which actually makes programming useful is not at all abstracted here, it's just more ambiguous and verbose. Implementing, for instance, a cryptographic hash function here would be completely impossible. The logic would be just as arcane, and the bitwise and arithmetic operations would be completely incomprehensible. You cannot convince me or most other programmers that "Take (number), shift its bits left 27 times, multiply by an arbitrary constant (121743), apply an arbitrary modulus (43758), then do the same for 4 other numbers and combine them xor some more arbitrary constants, then store the result in (seed)". That's completely unreadable compared to, say, "seed = (number
I understand the motivation behind it, but from what I've seen for most people the problem isn't syntax. While it might be a little hard to read at first, most people can get used to the syntax well enough within an hour or so. The problem is always that programming requires a certain way of thinking that needs to be picked up. Also, the js code looks to be less than 40% the length of the English+. Being verbose really hurts how fast you can code and also solve problems. Cool project overall, but I don't think this actually solves any problems that exist in programming
I think this is a noble goal, and I like seeing new unique ideas for programming languages. I see something that I think is an issue with this approach, though. It appears that you took semantics from existing languages, and used new syntax on top of it. I believe that what most non-programmers struggle with is the semantics of programming languages, moreso than the syntax. When people understand the semantics of a programming language, the syntax becomes not a major concern. This is why programmers can typically pick up a new language quickly - they know other languages that share semantics, so they primarily need to learn new syntax. I'd also argue that natural language isn't always the clearest way to represent a concept. This is why mathematics uses symbols - because the relationship between the symbols on the paper more clearly represents the concepts than you could with natural language.
I don’t see a way around the semantics with my current understanding. But with change in syntax this is what I came up with. I want to see with this idea what new ideas will come up. Especially when someone watches this video and gets inspired.
I thought it'd be like teaching a computer english without using language models based on the title, but immediately from the thumbnail I got humbled pretty quickly
As far as I see it shell scripting essentially accomplishes this. The syntax is both efficient and sufficiently similar to English, and it can be used to accomplish many of the same goals as with more traditional programming languages. Someone could definitely start with shell scripting and bridge over to more traditional languages once they become more comfortable with it. I recommend at least some experience working with the command line first. This was probably my bridge, to be honest, and I'm self-taught.
dude with all due respect to your work, this honestly is a layer of extra work to be done when creating something. I do think it might become a trend because its something that can be ChatGPT integrated with (maybe) one time only configuration. In case you thought it can be used to rewritten base production code, it would need to have a very stable base of versions and compilers to actually consider the idea. Great job on the video regardlesss, hope you keep working on it!
Of course I will continue working on it. I am very excited about this topic. I think if people give this idea a chance, the positives will be a bit easier to see. Especially once there are people who actually use it and can vouch for it that it should exist.
@@PecaCS I have a hard time seeing anything like this catching on since programming is something you need to be precise in and natural language is intentionally very vague.
@@PecaCS Yeah sure it is technically as precise as other languages but using imprecise language to describe precise operations is a problem in my opinion since you would have to look at the config to be sure of what something does in certain cases.
You need also to reinvent and democratize the math. The whole idea of is so ridiculous i don't even know where to start )) It's like... a professional decides to talk to other professionals in a common language, without use of professional dictionary. Like "oh, put that thing into that hole and turn the red thing on". Very accurate and understandable.
I don't know about you, guys, but for me, I can read and understand C++ code much quicker than plain english. Programming language codes are made to be very compact, but plain languages like english need a lot of words to convey the same meaning.
true, Honestly having to write "define a function with one argument (x) and name (wtv) (...)" It is not simpler than "wtv(x){}" you have to know that you need to declare and how to declare, why write it all up? Its just a different syntax, arguably harder. I guess what would make all the points of this video true is only if you write in wtv (coherent) way and the compiler understands
I think we are not writing code for the computer to understand but it needs to be a formal language that is not ambiguous. Formulas in math also must not be ambiguous and that's why they too can look complicated.
Honestly I feel like most popular programming languages can be picked up fairly easily, it's just hard to find a lesson that teaches it in the right way. Just because someone understands something, doesn't mean they'll be good at teaching it to other people, and it feels like that's a lot more true when it comes to programming languages, although when someone does learn a language there are still problems when it comes to less common things that can be done, since it's less common it's less likely to be taught so you could go your whole life not knowing certain functions of the language you use most of the time, although that's true for any language, not just programming languages. I think an English one would definitely help for learning what things do, but I also think it would be easier to mess up the lines since there are so many ways of saying the same thing.
This reminds me of the Ruby cucumber gem back when it had more use. You first write Ruby code, then you add tests through cucumber, so if something fails, the end user can see which part is failing by looking through the natural language inspired cucumber tests. Also, if something needed extra tweaking the customer would have submitted the cucumber tests so the incentive of this test framework would have gone vince versa. I like the idea, but there is way more typing in cucumber and in your language also.
If you mean syntax highlighting for English+, check the pinned video on how I made English+. There I showed the VS code extension I made which has syntax highlighting and auto translation of the English+ file to javascript file for example.
I too was once a naive computer science student and thought this would be a good idea. Oh, how the times have changed, how I've grown and learned. If nothing else, thank you for allowing me to remember those times and good luck with your own learning!
Programming languages that use computer syntax are actually better than english-like languages, because it forces your brain to think like the computer which leads to faster code writing. If you want more readability, just use Java
Interesting exercise. On the flip side, that's the reason every new language is getting worse and useless. There is a reason why math as a language does not change to be simpler for toddlers to understand, on the contrary. Short and cryptic is the best thing ever. It describes an idea/algorithm/concept with special symbols to be short and precise. Doing math or programming without learning the special language is impossible.
it's good (for sure) to invent a new - easy to understand - programming language ,but the better is to make that invented language capable of doing complicated tasks quickly
Cool project idea, but I really disagree with the implication that this is an improvement over traditional programming and that it is the start of the next era of programming feels misguided. First of all the claim that "modern programming languages are designed to be easy for the computer to understand" is false. ASM is easy for a computer to understand. Java is not. For a computer to run Java it needs to do tons of new things that it can't do normally: syntax parsing, dealing w/ registers/memory/managing a stack+heap, and memory management (The programmer doesn't need to worry about these things in modern languages.) Modern languages are still far from human language for sure, but that's because it is impossible to map every english sentence 1:1 to computer code. Human language can often be incredibly complex and vague. Computers can't (easily) deal with this vagueness because they are explicitly designed to execute code line by line. There are a near infinite number of ways to execute the english sentence "Make me a cool game where the player runs and jumps", but in english it is equally correct as saying "set a variable called X to 23" which has an easy conversion to code. Maybe AI/LLMs can help guess what the programmer is trying to say, but there is no perfect way to deal with vagueness. So from here on out I'm making an assumption here that English+ works like a template system judging by the way you defined your config file when converting phaser library code to English+ (I was unable to find source code anywhere so I'd love to know if it works differently) As said before, languages can often have vague sentences. Assuming English+ works like a templating system, the name "English+" is misleading. If a new programmer used English+ they will eventually type an English sentence not specified in your config or break the syntax slightly and the program won't work. You can update the config to match this error, but it is impossible to account for EVERY valid way of describing what I want the computer to do in english. English+ code is more readable to non-programmers at first, but this does not make it a better language for programming. A regular person will find a car's steering wheel more readable vs an airplane cockpit, but that does not make your car's steering better for planes. English+ may help ease some people into programming, but they will still need to learn how to code a different language to do anything specific. If a new programmer wants to write anything outside of the config template they will need to learn to code another language. Of course if every core feature from a language is added to the config file this is no longer necessary, but in that case the user will end up having to learn the language anyways, just with these core features translated to your templates. Beyond the very first impression, it doesn't decrease work or make anything easier. On top of that it's just way slower to write in English+ than most languages. Modern languages are not designed to be easy for computers to understand, they are designed to be easy for programmers to write. You have created something that is easier for non-programmers to read, but harder for programmers to read and harder for programmers to write. Your experience with using English+ to help understand Phaser's documentation is neat, but it further shows that one must already understand programming to use English+ effectively. (I need to understand how functions are called to properly create a template, and thus need to understand programming). And if one understands programming, why go for a more verbose and less efficient method when they can write in a language designed to be easy to write? Despite this I do like the idea of English+ being a sort of "universal" layer that can let you use a library/API with custom syntax, that is a cool use case. Again, I like this project a lot and think it can be fun to play around with. I like the idea of making a language's syntax tweakable to our liking (ex. English+ can theoretically let me use lowercase `true/false` in python! that's neat!) But even so I believe the claim that English+ will usher a new generation of programming is delusional. I admire the ambition but I feel a strong dunning kruger effect here because wanting to write code in english is a common question asked by beginner programmers, but not so much after programmers learn more about how a computer works. I hope despite this, your ambition stays strong throughout your programming journey as you clearly have talent and drive.
I started programming with FORTRAN on punch cards and I've seen a lot since then. I am skeptical of making programming more English-like BUT you should continue your efforts here. Who knows where it will lead? I remember when Tcl, Perl, PHP, Python, Java and others were the brand-new kids on the block with unknown futures and look how those turned out!
I honestly think this has a lot of potential if you don't take it to the extreme, but find a right balance between English language and conciseness. For example instead of: - define a function with 1 argument (scene) and name (createThePlatforms) that executes (a sequence of instructions) - (a sequence of instructions) is: - declare a variable (platformGround) and assign (an initial value) to it You'd have something like: createThePlatform is function with arguments (scene) when executed: platformGround is variable with value of (an initial value)
The cool thing about English+ is that how a function will look like in English is decided entirely by the user. I may just need to add even more freedom on how you combine blocks from the configuration file so you can use English+ even in this way. I want it to be like Minecraft, you have complete freedom on what and how you build and if you break it down to each block it’s really simple.
but what i think is AI coding tools will act as a middle man to writing and reading code in English, with code syntax in the background, and in the near future nobody even reads and write that background code to a point, everyone forget they even exist.
You can't sightread this, in normal code important patterns are easy to recognize, even for relatively inexperienced programmers, you can get a gist of what the program is doing just by skimming over it. Here there's a wall of text, yes technically there are patterns too, but the characters blend into each other a lot, it takes way longer to maintain since i have to first find the important information before understanding it. I am a rather fast reader and yet it really slows me down.
nice project. there's a couple of problems with such a language design that tries to be as English as possible. \- many programming languages are already in english. their syntax is just kept short and to the point. \- its very wordy, and very unnecessarily verbose. many people do not like reading walls of text. reading excessively verbose code actually makes it harder to work out what is going on. \- whilst i can read the lines themselves and understand what they are saying, i don't know why it does what it says it does. this is the same problem as with reading comments. comments can lie. \- english itself is not a language that can be interpreted the same way for every person. there is always room for interpretation. this is not a good quality in a programming language, as it makes things unnecessarily vague to someone who didn't write it. \- why include the "config" stuff as a seperate file? why not just have it at the top of the current file? what if i want multiple different english+ files in the same directory that don't have the same config? \- in the code i write i use comments sparingly. it is not a good idea to go overboard with comments. i let the code speak for itself, and if it doesn't, i add comments.
i dont think they are put off by the syntax, everyone learns it eventually, even myself being a beginner, i never got a hard time learning syntax, and I memorised them as i kept using them
@@PecaCS And that person would be me+7.5 billion other humans that find it extremely difficult to understand stupid ass syntax code while juggling to understand how to even form the logic syntactically all because past programmers thought it wasn't cool enough to fix this horrible issue. These high lvl programming languages should only be shrouded/covered up for hardware/software to run on and let us have human languages like prolog & E++ that we can actually understand so we can get shit done faster. I hope this gets the attention of Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Subbed.
@@BlakeTedKord I don't think English+ would really be of much help, as it's basically a syntactical wrapper around javascript, a language with famously stupid semantics, and with less ability to ensure the code is correct
I feel like this language has some potential, but perhaps something like chatGPT (or another ai) could help interpret your commands so that there is a little bit of fluidity in your sentence writing? It would be annoying if it got something wrong though.
I don't think programming syntax is all that hard to read, especially when your target audience is programmers (which it will be in a software engineering environment). Rather, it's the thought process behind why code was written a certain way. There's no need to explain that `add(x, y)` adds two numbers, but you would need to explain why you used that instead of writing `x + y`.
Very cool! Throughout time the syntax of a language has only become more readable by making it closer to english language. I wonder though if the effectiveness of making a language closer to english is not linear and perhaps a bell curve. Meaning there is a point in which a language's syntax is most effective thus making it closer to english decreases its effectiveness and vice versa. This concern is only more valid as I read the other points made against this in the comment section.
My focus is not on the effectiveness. I am focusing on changing the way we interact with code. To create such a new perspective and then someone else get’s inspired and makes a better version which is what people would actually use.
@@PecaCS Effectiveness should 100% be the main goal otherwise why would people spend the time and energy to learn this language if it is ultimately just a lateral switch or worse, the syntax makes you less effective.
You actually have it backwards. The languages are defined to be easy for humans to understand. If we wanted to make it efficient for machines, we'd be writing 0s and 1s, as in the end, that is how they are consuming it (after going through a few layers of compilation / transpiling / interpretation).
But that’s the thing, we have to learn them, no matter how much simpler it is. Each one has a different syntax, it starts to add up. Most projects rely on multiple languages. We already know English and it will be used in place of every other language. That’s my viewpoint.
@@PecaCS I'm not a big fan of expecting people to understand English. You end up with a world in which native English speakers dominate. Most computer languages are much more universal and less biased towards people who happened to be born in a certain place.
@@PecaCS I learned a regular programming language through Spanish resources way before I started to learn English. The problem stands. And in fact it's now way bigger, since learning natural languages is much more difficult and time consuming. You can learn N mainstream programming languages by the time you finish learning a natural language. Maybe N=10 is a logical number? It depends on how the language is designed, so on how much of the natural language you need to learn. But regular programming languages are much easier to learn, read, and write to begin with. There's not even the need to read code, but simply to scan it - as their specific and well-defined semantics can only mean one or a few things, and the syntax lacking of unnecessary words renders a clearly visible and understandable structure at a quick glance. To solve this many languages problem, we can standardize any regular programming language, and forget everything else. Can we? Of course not! We wouldn't even be able to standardize one and only "English programming language", as people will keep creating "better variants" of it.
I expected a shitpost but this is pretty cool. The basic idea of "the comment is the function name" is very similar to Gherkin, although that language is built for a specific purpose and lacks most of the features of a general purpose programming language.
@@PecaCS I was introduced to Gherkin at a previous workplace and still use it now. It's a domain-specific language for test automation sequences; the idea is that test engineers and their stakeholders can both reason about and discuss the program w/o knowing the underlying language. One difference is that the "comments" are not meant to describe what the program is doing but what is happening to the UUT (unit under test) during the program, and use a 3A or Given/When/Then notation. One issue that comes to mind w/ Gherkin is namespacing, or how to prevent name conflicts when two operations can be described very similarly. Some Gherkin runners push everything to global namespace, while others require descriptions to be explicitly linked to the files in which they are used. I wonder if you've thought about this
I had a problem like that with describing creating a function. A function can have no arguments, one argument, etc. my solution was the naive one to just describe each one separately. So if I need a function with 4 arguments I have to first describe what that is even though I have a very similar description of what a function with 3 arguments is.
isnt Ruby written like a haiku? thats its gimmick right? Anyways, this is amazing. I hope it catches on. i know other languages that are kind of jokey like the Recipe Language where you print "hello world" like - 2 eggs, one pancake, eat pancake or something. Its wild.
Tbh there is a very cool way to easly translate any language to any code. Chat GPT can do it for you, so you can make anything you want even with very basic knowledge. Imagine if there was some advanced AI-based language that could directly translate any language (the real language the way we use it) to actual code, skipping all the half measures like computer languages etc. So for example, you just type "make a calculator app", AI knows what you mean and makes it, then you can adjust more complex features just by typing stuff like "add a small border around the buttons", "make the background black", ... and voila, it's done. This could be the real future of programming.
I think that the worst part about this is that your first language isn't even english. There's of course the democratizaction of programming that's already been done like with chat gpt, or the 2 width space but honestly i can't even get past the iron of this being english in particular
Currently no way because while playing around there is a high chance a bug I don’t know about can come up that has to be fixed. I don’t want people to get more frustration than help while using English+. Not ready for public use.
I quite like the idea behind E++, BUT: it is not suitable for big projects because of the gigantic "mass" of text you have to write. I think it's nice for helping you understand the logic behind, say, an algorithm or a small codebase. But when it gets to the point of working with it, really using it, I imagine it being quite annoying to write that much for what it results in. And still, it is a cool and interesting concept, and I think it has potential to grow and being used for educational purposes. 👍
Programming languages are for humans, not for machines, because machines understand only machine code. We use these languages instead of natural ones because natural languages just (obviously) were not invented for writing programs and are not really convenient for that purpose. Even your invention is not english, it is some english-like programming language with strictly defined syntax without many exceptions and details that english has. And obviously you can't compile my comment with it. And, by the way, as someone already said in comments, you basically reinvented COBOL :) I'm not hating or something, just expressing my thoughts, English+ is an interesting idea anyway. Good luck with your projects!
Watch this video next: th-cam.com/video/2SN-p0WX76g/w-d-xo.html
I know english
^
I
Error. No point.
I do think it's pretty interesting. Do you have a github link ?
This is awesome! Where can we start coding in E++?
now make Estrogen++
wow thats crazy. pls remember me when you get famous (913th sub)
Congratulations, you invented COBOL :D
In all seriousness, as someone who tutored an introductory programming class, syntax is not a large hurdle for most; All students already have experience dealing with "weird"/rigid syntax (e.g. algebra, chemical equations). The hardest thing for most is the problem solving part: "how do I get from the problem description to a step-by-step solution?"
How do you help them improve at problem solving in programming
IMHO the problem is how variables are introduced, ie from the computer perspective, when really they represent concept not just memory. For example gravity hold a value but represent a force applied. When enunciating the problem, you can use the description to map directly to the smaller steps
Same, I've seen students understand what most of the commands in a language can do but their issue wasn't the tools in their hands but how to use it. They'd lack the ability to formulate a simple algorithm, even if I were to ask them to write it in plain english they'd still fail it. The problem rarely is the notation itself but one's ability to think logically and programmatically.
@@PecaCS Teach them basic logic. Boolean algebra, logic gates, argumentative logic, algorithm notation, flowcharts etc. And then make them think of as many algorithms as they can, make them solve problems and write the steps to solving it, provide tips, multiple solutions, show them how an algorithm often look like, teach them methods to solving problems such as divide and conquer, induction, deduction, trial and error, brute force etc, maybe even talk about big O notation briefly to introduce how to analyse algorithms, and maybe, just maybe, some of them will learn.
@@PecaCS And then that will teach them how to solve problems, however how to solve computable problems might still be a necessary leap for some. Hence teaching basic computer architecture might be just what they need to get it.
I don't know if this is a joke video, or if you are serious, but trying to remember all these phrases instead of simple keywords would be a real pain in the ass.
I made a VS code extension that autocompletes from your config file while you type. Check out the pinned comment video link.
I think is a good proof of concept. Interesting but not so useful
yh i found the js easier to look at than the english+ if yk what i mean
oh god this guy is serious
I had that shocking realization only halfway through the video... @stuwustudio
High-level programming languages are made for humans (that's why compilers exist) and I don't see how this language is easier to read in any way
Cobol was originally created to be an english like language & because of that it was looked down on by many programmers even though it was very good for what it was designed to do
Still is the backend of 90% of banking systems....
Except Cobol is nothing like english and is extremely obfuscated and annoying to read/write.
@@TheOnlyGhxst English by comity :D
@@TheOnlyGhxstjust like English lol
High level languages are optimised for human readability, hence the need for a compiler to machine code which is actually optimised for computer readability.
The nature of programming is closer to math than to a recipe hence the comments explain the underlying maths behind the syntax.
What projects do you work on?
Math is just fundamental grammar, programming is a representation of actions, it totally legit to see it as language
@@PecaCS studying electronics, so assembly and c is used quite a bit. Hence when I switch from low level languages to high I lose lots of control for easier readability.
but this cook book like language is like making a cook book like language for math(i.e. word problems) yes its possible but it brings ambiguity of language and unnecessary length.
Also just a point, most of the time programmers try to abbreviate their names. A better method would be to make an auto generating pseudo code in a separate file.
@@PecaCS Irrelevant question. And something like Fortran is probably easier to understand while being much much faster to run (yes, including compile time) and write 😂
WHO IS YOUR DADDY AND WHAT DOES HE DO?@@PecaCS
I'm currently working on my own structured English coding language, I guess you beat me to it 😂
What you make will be different. Finish it, I want to see it. Good luck.
@@PecaCS Thanks, it's more of a long-term project but I've made some aspects of it already
@@PecaCS I've released a showcase video of the language files so far
@@PythonProgrammmer I saw the video, check out my comment on it
I think anyone who will use a language like this for a few hours will realize that writing, reading, let alone remembering long sentences is far more inefficient than it needs to be. So they will add "shortcuts" where instead of writing "define a function with 1 argument" you will just write "func 1" or something. So you'll end up with a regular programming language with extra steps.
Maybe a better goal would be to have an IDE transform chunks of code, from a regular programming language, into an English description of what the chunk does. But that's only something that will show up in the editor after it's been written in the regular programming language. Not what the programmer writes, and not what the compiler reads. I can imagine AI being used for this but a deterministic, classical approach would be better.
As an example: math, before algebra became what it is today, was extremely hard to work and solve problems with, because it used a lot of natural language. Today, anyone is free to use whatever "math language" they want. And yet we choose symbols over English because this is what the human brain is best at working with. We do use English, but only to describe at a high level what the symbols mean, after we've written them, so future people will be able to understand it easier. We don't replace the symbols with English. Maybe that's what we should do with programming as well.
So basically computer generated comments which abstract away blocks of code, so it's easier to read, but not harder to write.
My goal with English+ is exactly that. Chunks of code are one english sentence. It will be the description of a function. And what the function does is also in plain english. There is no need for shortcuts, I made VS code extension that autocompletes while you type from your config. As I see it our views align.
@@PecaCS bro trust me this is fucking stupid
Tbh the english+ code scared me more than the Js code
I think this is brilliant but I agree with comments saying this could make understanding code more difficult. Though it's probably a matter of habit, I find it easier to read, write and understand code that looks like code and math functions than code that looks like recipes.
This has a lot of potential though, I'm sure there's a sweet middle point in which the actual coding experience gets better for both experienced programmers and people who know nothing about programming and not much about maths
What makes this brilliant
and that sweet middle point is python
@@xkjjx I actually thought a middle ground between this and python. Python is FAR from ideal
I imagine something like this being used by someone, and the compiler returns "Improper grammar error in line 12: Comma expected"
The most telling thing here is "I copy pasted the code snippets from a tutorial but I still.dudnt understand it". The mapping from concepts to syntax ought to happen in the student's brain - so any good tutorial should show you the basic syntax then describe what you need to build and leave it to the student to write the final code, otherwise you're just downloading sample code in sections
If the tutorials are not good all that I am left with is the documentation. English+ makes a good tutorial out of the documentation for when that’s all you currently have.
You still have to select which English words to use. Then you need to give each Word a meaning. Some words have three meaning. They already created such language and it's called COBOL.
There will be a time when you program by talking as in Star Trek.
I don’t know cobol can you give more examples on the similarities, interested to learn more.
PERFORM VARYING count FROM 1 BY 1 UNTIL count IS GREATER THAN max-count
MULTIPLY number BY count GIVING result
ADD result TO total
END-PERFORM.
DIVIDE total BY number-1 GIVING number-2 REMAINDER number-3.
PERFORM some-procedure 10 TIMES.
@@PecaCS - I believe you’re talking about a written version of what will be used in the 23rd century when computers can receive orders and commands to perform something, the way Commander Data of Star Trek does it in the year 2400. You’re on the right track. Your idea would be better for a talking programming language. People find COBOL too tedious and too long to write programs.
More human like language can be simpler for beginner but experienced get their things done faster with classic languages.
Its called python 😂
Edit: My comment could also apply to SQL and COBOL
2nd Edit: I didn't know I would cause a global programming languages war in the comments 😂
This ahahah
and its the worst language ever made
@@StarsOfMinecrafttr agree. I hate using tabs and it's slow and its dynamic typing.
@@StarsOfMinecrafttr tell me you are a researcher with no other work experience without telling me you are a researcher with no other work experience. If it saves time for the engineers and developers to make a proof of concept of whatever, it is useful and, thus, great. You can improve the solution to other languages later.
The greatness in python is not having to worry about random bullshit you don't care when experimenting something.
with open("arr2.json", a) as fp:
arr2 = json.dump(fp)
Yeah, surely looks like English.
That is an interesting project. It is worth noting that English isn't completely devoid of the special characters we use in coding, though it does look more cryptic in code because they are much more common. Though you have languages like Lua which have a very nice balance. This could open the door to very fast programming because there are tools built for english such as the charachorder which make english much faster, but code not so much.
How does Lua have a nice balance compared to Python? Just wondering, as I don't know much about Lua itself.
What makes it interesting? What is your experience with programming
Making a programming language is always a good project for experience.
Many people have already pointed out a lot of what I'd consider problems. But to expand on them:
English has many words with different interpretations, hundreds of grammar rules, tenses, etc.. Are you expecting that different people will be able to understand long sentences the same way? Common programming languages have fewer than 50 keywords (e.g. C, Java, Python, Go, PHP). Some have up to 100 (e.g. C++, C#).
The problem with long sentences is that at some point users of this language won't want to read or write it anymore. The benefit of cryptic text is - when you understand it, you can quickly scan the code and find what you need. It's easy to pick out variable declarations, assignments, function calls, conditions, loops, etc. when you know what to expect.
And because this is significantly different from the average programming language, the programmer is not really learning a "proper" programming language. I don't really want to argue about gatekeeping. In reality, if someone can't handle learning the syntax, they probably can't handle programming.
Longer text is also harder to keep in working memory.
But the most glaring issue is that just because the text explains everything, it doesn't mean you can solve or even understand the problems you'll be working with. After all, you're still dealing with computers, their architecture, boolean arithmetic, the operating system, libraries and APIs, multithreading, algorithms of all kinds, etc.
In the end, this is like writing numbers as "three hundred fifty seven million, five hundred fifteen thousand, eight hundred and one, point, five, eight, three, two", instead of 357515801.5832.
But if anything, I'd recommend:
- Making the syntax smaller, like "call Function with x, y, z", "for element in array", "for i from 0 to 10", "set x to 1 + y".
- Probably use braces or parentheses for blocks, because indentation is horrible to organize.
- Make some sort of way to write comments. I'd rather read "// Euler's algorithm" and then 50 lines of complex math code than a 1000 line novella about the intricacies of the algorithm.
- Reading "Crafting Interpreters", there's a free online version of it.
I had an idea of creating a language with functions, which parameters can be placed anywhere in between the function name, e.g.
Define: Sleep for (Seconds: Int) seconds {
// ...
}
Sleep for 5 seconds;
Maybe I should write a compiler for it
Going through the comments, I noticed that this person is quite inquisitive and is eager to learn more from folks who either genuinely, or snobbishly act like they, know more. Kudos to you, Sir.
As a programmer this code scares me
Back in the day, math problems were described in long paragraphs of analogies, geometry, and what not.
The Sir Isaac Newton invented the standardized algebra notation we use to day, and we never went back. There's a reason for that.
syntax doesn't matter unless you're a beginner, in which case you're most likely not doing anything substantial. Experienced engineers understand programming languages in the same way that they understand written text, what matters is the message (data structures and algorithms) behind it, not necessarily the actual words (implementation details like syntax) used.
So an experienced engineer can open any github repository and the syntax will not be problem? They will for sure need to go through the documentation of the language. What I am aiming for is for the dev to be able to understand on his first reading what is happening. I also agree that what matters is the message. We are on the same page with that part.
@@PecaCS The same issue may arise for users of English++ who are not native English speakers. Writing extensively about a text can be time-consuming, and beginners often find it more valuable to grasp the logic behind algorithms and data structures. Understanding how compilers and computers function takes precedence over syntax. What may take 10 minutes to write in C++ or JavaScript could extend to 15-20 minutes in English++.
and the beginners will take more time to interpreter the sintax that just making a simple while you know?
@@PecaCS "So an experienced engineer can open any github repository and the syntax will not be problem? " Yes, 100%, yes! I've needed to go into large codebases blind many, many built with nearly all languages you can think of (imperative and declarative) Only on rare occasions is syntax something that will confuse me, the only exception is for languages with all of syntax sugar and idioms that I'm not specialized in.
What takes time to understand these codebases are more abstract things like function call graphs, class management and architecture.
@@PecaCSExperienced engineers, according to the creator of LaTeX and TLA+, are brainwashed.
The thing is, code is in a weird syntax for the computer to understand, it's just that it's the standard, compilers could understand anything they are coded to understand
Standards change
@@PecaCS they haven't though? and using symbols and keywords once learned is way more effective. integer var is set to 8 is way slower to write and read than int var = 8
By calling it English+ he admitted right away that he is using the C compiler🤣
I can see this being useful for generating documentation, like taking a more complex code file and compiling it into this language so you can compare them side by side to figure out what's going on. But for practical use, at least in my experience, I find myself having to work around the machine more than the machine has to work around me, but having a layer of abstraction is nice. So I'd rather the code syntax be a happy medium between plain english and machine code. But this is an interesting idea nonetheless!
I really like the video and think the idea is great, however the premise that programming languages are designed to be easy for computers and hard for people is completely backwards. That's why we have compilers, etc., they were made so that humans can easily interact with computers without having to manually edit memory or change 1s to 0s
The madlad really did it. He reinvented COBOL.
I do believe this is quite an interesting project, but I see some glaring problems. This isn't meant to demotivate or insult your work, but rather as a neutral inquiry.
- the main motivation behind english+ seems to be unreadability of normal code. What are the advantages of english+ here? All it seems to do is the same process but with longer statements. In my (personal) opinion, the hardest part of reading code is understanding what it's doing. This can already be explained by comments. Even with english+, each individual line might be more readable (to non programmers), but that does little to explain the underlying logic.
- do you plan on making english+ a stepping stone or a full platform. if you plan on the latter, how do you plan on making code efficient?
I only showed a project made in a few days with English+. My theory is that when we start building modular blocks with the basic ones that are a long description, that’s where it will shine the most. I plan to build my next program entirely in English plus and see if it’s significantly different and better. Right now I just got the idea, got excited and quickly implemented it and tested out on a small game how it looks like. I plan to continue experimenting with it.
I think you have this wrong, coding's complexity doesn't come from its syntax, it comes from the problem solving. Like the other guy said, this is what comments are for. Also, if you continue this project, make it a C++ Transpiler instead of an Interpreted language like JS, it's faster and the code will be optimized by the C compiler.
I was thinking exactly this!!
The only advantage I see is for newbies to learn the recipes and understand the fundamentals. After that, they might adapt easier to other languages
I'm shocked that I never thought that before. English+ is such a natural extension of abstraction. Programming already a huge abstraction: machine code -> assembly -> ...
Thank you for the video, I'm currently working on English+ for Javascript :)
Really cool idea
subbed
This was very enjoyable to watch! You just earned a sub
its decent for non programmers, but honestly, its way too long, heres some code they wrote (~1:41): - add image ('assets/dude.png') with specified frame width (32) and frame height (48) to current load queue of (the current scene) and upon success ad to the global Texture Manager, referenced with ('dude')
I am happy it looks like it would be of help to non programmers.
such a cool idea nd project, surprised you only have 90 subs and this video only has a few hundred views, make more!
stop begging for likes though
Thank you for the kind words. I have a lot of future ideas stored and a couple of projects in development. This is only the beginning.
Just for you in my latest video there was no mention of liking and subscribing
Something like this exists for Minecraft server scripts, it's called Skript.
Really interesting, thank you for mentioning.
i remember trying to use skript and i hated it, i had to learn all these weird rules that were meant to make it more like english but just complicated things when you wanted to do something specific...
@@Konomi_io Yeah thats usually the problem of languages that try to be as close to a real language imo.
This is an interesting concept, but there is a reason why we write high-level code the way we do. Language grammar and syntax is tuned to the nature of the problem. It is concise and specific. English, or any natural language, would have too much filler, and if we remove all the filler, we probably end up again with what we already have for code. Of course there is large variation there and some is domain-specific. Code is akin to a mathematical formula and logical symbols. Think of rewriting every complex mathematical formula as a word problem and tell me which is more succinct, exact and legible.
What makes it interesting
When you're early into computerdev you naturally think you should make something like this, but when you actually get into the weeds you realize that there's nothing wrong with lower level programming and the fact it gatekeeps less experienced programmers is a good thing. You don't *want* people who don't know what they're doing to be able write things, because they're going to be low quality. Instead you want to make the process as painless for those who actually do know what they're doing.
Perfect example of this is implicit type casting. In 90% of cases it does what you want it to do but that other 10% it can be insufferable that it decides for you what you want it to do when that's not what you want. Lua will cast every number to double, which leads to an infamous bug within the language where you'll add two numbers and end up with an unreasonable amount of trailing zeros. On the other end you have the crap C# does where if you don't explicitly cast a divisor as a float or double, it will do integer division. That's fucking annoying too.
The config files just make this a verbose translation layer to the same code anyway. "You'll understand the concepts better by reading the documentation and following tutorials in order to make the config" oh, you mean, like learning how to program? That's a wild idea.
What's more, the english code here is not any more clear than ordinary syntax of high-level languages, because the description is much too low-level. Referencing the snippet at 2:24, if someone doesn't understand, for instance, platforms.append(createGameObject(x: 600, y: 400, texture: 'ground')), they won't understand your sentence any better. There is essentially no one who is confused by the micro-scale syntax of modern, high-level programming languages. The (often esoteric) logic which actually makes programming useful is not at all abstracted here, it's just more ambiguous and verbose. Implementing, for instance, a cryptographic hash function here would be completely impossible. The logic would be just as arcane, and the bitwise and arithmetic operations would be completely incomprehensible.
You cannot convince me or most other programmers that "Take (number), shift its bits left 27 times, multiply by an arbitrary constant (121743), apply an arbitrary modulus (43758), then do the same for 4 other numbers and combine them xor some more arbitrary constants, then store the result in (seed)". That's completely unreadable compared to, say, "seed = (number
If I changed one thing, what should that be
I understand the motivation behind it, but from what I've seen for most people the problem isn't syntax. While it might be a little hard to read at first, most people can get used to the syntax well enough within an hour or so. The problem is always that programming requires a certain way of thinking that needs to be picked up.
Also, the js code looks to be less than 40% the length of the English+. Being verbose really hurts how fast you can code and also solve problems.
Cool project overall, but I don't think this actually solves any problems that exist in programming
What makes it cool
I think this is a noble goal, and I like seeing new unique ideas for programming languages. I see something that I think is an issue with this approach, though. It appears that you took semantics from existing languages, and used new syntax on top of it. I believe that what most non-programmers struggle with is the semantics of programming languages, moreso than the syntax. When people understand the semantics of a programming language, the syntax becomes not a major concern. This is why programmers can typically pick up a new language quickly - they know other languages that share semantics, so they primarily need to learn new syntax.
I'd also argue that natural language isn't always the clearest way to represent a concept. This is why mathematics uses symbols - because the relationship between the symbols on the paper more clearly represents the concepts than you could with natural language.
I don’t see a way around the semantics with my current understanding. But with change in syntax this is what I came up with. I want to see with this idea what new ideas will come up. Especially when someone watches this video and gets inspired.
I thought it'd be like teaching a computer english without using language models based on the title, but immediately from the thumbnail I got humbled pretty quickly
This guy is either a genius comedian or barking mad.
What is barking mad
First thing that sprang to mind was the programming language Inform, though that’s geared specifically towards interactive fiction games.
As far as I see it shell scripting essentially accomplishes this. The syntax is both efficient and sufficiently similar to English, and it can be used to accomplish many of the same goals as with more traditional programming languages. Someone could definitely start with shell scripting and bridge over to more traditional languages once they become more comfortable with it. I recommend at least some experience working with the command line first. This was probably my bridge, to be honest, and I'm self-taught.
Isn't it called prompt engineering nowadays?
It’s different
dude with all due respect to your work, this honestly is a layer of extra work to be done when creating something. I do think it might become a trend because its something that can be ChatGPT integrated with (maybe) one time only configuration. In case you thought it can be used to rewritten base production code, it would need to have a very stable base of versions and compilers to actually consider the idea.
Great job on the video regardlesss, hope you keep working on it!
Of course I will continue working on it. I am very excited about this topic. I think if people give this idea a chance, the positives will be a bit easier to see. Especially once there are people who actually use it and can vouch for it that it should exist.
@@PecaCS I have a hard time seeing anything like this catching on since programming is something you need to be precise in and natural language is intentionally very vague.
Each sentence used can be located in the config and we can see to what code it is translated. How can I make it more precise, what is it missing?
@@PecaCS Yeah sure it is technically as precise as other languages but using imprecise language to describe precise operations is a problem in my opinion since you would have to look at the config to be sure of what something does in certain cases.
i think this is beautiful! :D
You need also to reinvent and democratize the math.
The whole idea of is so ridiculous i don't even know where to start ))
It's like... a professional decides to talk to other professionals in a common language, without use of professional dictionary. Like "oh, put that thing into that hole and turn the red thing on".
Very accurate and understandable.
Math is fine
I don't think this is going anywhere. Modern languages and even python can feel like natural language with little hours of practice.
What do you mean by going anywhere
I don't know about you, guys, but for me, I can read and understand C++ code much quicker than plain english.
Programming language codes are made to be very compact, but plain languages like english need a lot of words to convey the same meaning.
true,
Honestly having to write "define a function with one argument (x) and name (wtv) (...)" It is not simpler than "wtv(x){}" you have to know that you need to declare and how to declare, why write it all up? Its just a different syntax, arguably harder. I guess what would make all the points of this video true is only if you write in wtv (coherent) way and the compiler understands
I think we are not writing code for the computer to understand but it needs to be a formal language that is not ambiguous. Formulas in math also must not be ambiguous and that's why they too can look complicated.
Honestly I feel like most popular programming languages can be picked up fairly easily, it's just hard to find a lesson that teaches it in the right way. Just because someone understands something, doesn't mean they'll be good at teaching it to other people, and it feels like that's a lot more true when it comes to programming languages, although when someone does learn a language there are still problems when it comes to less common things that can be done, since it's less common it's less likely to be taught so you could go your whole life not knowing certain functions of the language you use most of the time, although that's true for any language, not just programming languages. I think an English one would definitely help for learning what things do, but I also think it would be easier to mess up the lines since there are so many ways of saying the same thing.
This reminds me of the Ruby cucumber gem back when it had more use. You first write Ruby code, then you add tests through cucumber, so if something fails, the end user can see which part is failing by looking through the natural language inspired cucumber tests. Also, if something needed extra tweaking the customer would have submitted the cucumber tests so the incentive of this test framework would have gone vince versa. I like the idea, but there is way more typing in cucumber and in your language also.
Liking the idea is a good start
I’d love to see this with syntax highlighting!
If you mean syntax highlighting for English+, check the pinned video on how I made English+. There I showed the VS code extension I made which has syntax highlighting and auto translation of the English+ file to javascript file for example.
i love the fact that you speak so clearly, that even a person who doesn't have a so good level of english, can understand the video perfectly
English is not my first language, so I try my best to not make mistakes where it's hard to understand what I am trying to say.
@@PecaCS maybe for this is so easy for me to understand you, follow as this dude
this literally cause me an anxiety attack
I too was once a naive computer science student and thought this would be a good idea. Oh, how the times have changed, how I've grown and learned. If nothing else, thank you for allowing me to remember those times and good luck with your own learning!
My favourite part of this project was coming up with an idea and trying to make it work for the first time. I had fun making it.
print "hello world". we can do it so many ways. do this when i say this
damn i must switch from c to english+ now
Programming languages that use computer syntax are actually better than english-like languages, because it forces your brain to think like the computer which leads to faster code writing. If you want more readability, just use Java
i-ill stick with C still, it is easier
Interesting exercise.
On the flip side, that's the reason every new language is getting worse and useless. There is a reason why math as a language does not change to be simpler for toddlers to understand, on the contrary. Short and cryptic is the best thing ever. It describes an idea/algorithm/concept with special symbols to be short and precise. Doing math or programming without learning the special language is impossible.
it's good (for sure) to invent a new - easy to understand - programming language ,but the better is to make that invented language capable of doing complicated tasks quickly
Why does it feels like Lua Coding Language? I like it
Cool project idea, but I really disagree with the implication that this is an improvement over traditional programming and that it is the start of the next era of programming feels misguided.
First of all the claim that "modern programming languages are designed to be easy for the computer to understand" is false. ASM is easy for a computer to understand. Java is not. For a computer to run Java it needs to do tons of new things that it can't do normally: syntax parsing, dealing w/ registers/memory/managing a stack+heap, and memory management (The programmer doesn't need to worry about these things in modern languages.) Modern languages are still far from human language for sure, but that's because it is impossible to map every english sentence 1:1 to computer code. Human language can often be incredibly complex and vague. Computers can't (easily) deal with this vagueness because they are explicitly designed to execute code line by line. There are a near infinite number of ways to execute the english sentence "Make me a cool game where the player runs and jumps", but in english it is equally correct as saying "set a variable called X to 23" which has an easy conversion to code. Maybe AI/LLMs can help guess what the programmer is trying to say, but there is no perfect way to deal with vagueness.
So from here on out I'm making an assumption here that English+ works like a template system judging by the way you defined your config file when converting phaser library code to English+ (I was unable to find source code anywhere so I'd love to know if it works differently)
As said before, languages can often have vague sentences. Assuming English+ works like a templating system, the name "English+" is misleading. If a new programmer used English+ they will eventually type an English sentence not specified in your config or break the syntax slightly and the program won't work. You can update the config to match this error, but it is impossible to account for EVERY valid way of describing what I want the computer to do in english.
English+ code is more readable to non-programmers at first, but this does not make it a better language for programming. A regular person will find a car's steering wheel more readable vs an airplane cockpit, but that does not make your car's steering better for planes.
English+ may help ease some people into programming, but they will still need to learn how to code a different language to do anything specific. If a new programmer wants to write anything outside of the config template they will need to learn to code another language. Of course if every core feature from a language is added to the config file this is no longer necessary, but in that case the user will end up having to learn the language anyways, just with these core features translated to your templates. Beyond the very first impression, it doesn't decrease work or make anything easier.
On top of that it's just way slower to write in English+ than most languages. Modern languages are not designed to be easy for computers to understand, they are designed to be easy for programmers to write. You have created something that is easier for non-programmers to read, but harder for programmers to read and harder for programmers to write.
Your experience with using English+ to help understand Phaser's documentation is neat, but it further shows that one must already understand programming to use English+ effectively. (I need to understand how functions are called to properly create a template, and thus need to understand programming). And if one understands programming, why go for a more verbose and less efficient method when they can write in a language designed to be easy to write? Despite this I do like the idea of English+ being a sort of "universal" layer that can let you use a library/API with custom syntax, that is a cool use case.
Again, I like this project a lot and think it can be fun to play around with. I like the idea of making a language's syntax tweakable to our liking (ex. English+ can theoretically let me use lowercase `true/false` in python! that's neat!) But even so I believe the claim that English+ will usher a new generation of programming is delusional. I admire the ambition but I feel a strong dunning kruger effect here because wanting to write code in english is a common question asked by beginner programmers, but not so much after programmers learn more about how a computer works. I hope despite this, your ambition stays strong throughout your programming journey as you clearly have talent and drive.
I started programming with FORTRAN on punch cards and I've seen a lot since then. I am skeptical of making programming more English-like BUT you should continue your efforts here. Who knows where it will lead? I remember when Tcl, Perl, PHP, Python, Java and others were the brand-new kids on the block with unknown futures and look how those turned out!
I've been thinking about this for so long
I sure hope your invention will be successful and you will be successful
And I hope all the best to you. Have a good day.
I honestly think this has a lot of potential if you don't take it to the extreme, but find a right balance between English language and conciseness.
For example instead of:
- define a function with 1 argument (scene) and name (createThePlatforms) that executes (a sequence of instructions)
- (a sequence of instructions) is:
- declare a variable (platformGround) and assign (an initial value) to it
You'd have something like:
createThePlatform is function with arguments (scene)
when executed:
platformGround is variable with value of (an initial value)
The cool thing about English+ is that how a function will look like in English is decided entirely by the user. I may just need to add even more freedom on how you combine blocks from the configuration file so you can use English+ even in this way. I want it to be like Minecraft, you have complete freedom on what and how you build and if you break it down to each block it’s really simple.
my only issue is that it's way less dense then most programming languages
I can't wait to see Turtle Guy making a Christmas video with the phrase "Merry English!" 😁😁😁
Who is turtle guy
but what i think is AI coding tools will act as a middle man to writing and reading code in English, with code syntax in the background, and in the near future nobody even reads and write that background code to a point, everyone forget they even exist.
When do you think that will happen more mainstream
Expand more on your predictions
@@PecaCSsomeday in the future. When AI can have more understanding of our ambiguous language
You can't sightread this, in normal code important patterns are easy to recognize, even for relatively inexperienced programmers, you can get a gist of what the program is doing just by skimming over it. Here there's a wall of text, yes technically there are patterns too, but the characters blend into each other a lot, it takes way longer to maintain since i have to first find the important information before understanding it. I am a rather fast reader and yet it really slows me down.
Is it just me that saw that the thumbnail is in portugueese
nice project. there's a couple of problems with such a language design that tries to be as English as possible.
\- many programming languages are already in english. their syntax is just kept short and to the point.
\- its very wordy, and very unnecessarily verbose. many people do not like reading walls of text. reading excessively verbose code actually makes it harder to work out what is going on.
\- whilst i can read the lines themselves and understand what they are saying, i don't know why it does what it says it does. this is the same problem as with reading comments. comments can lie.
\- english itself is not a language that can be interpreted the same way for every person. there is always room for interpretation. this is not a good quality in a programming language, as it makes things unnecessarily vague to someone who didn't write it.
\- why include the "config" stuff as a seperate file? why not just have it at the top of the current file? what if i want multiple different english+ files in the same directory that don't have the same config?
\- in the code i write i use comments sparingly. it is not a good idea to go overboard with comments. i let the code speak for itself, and if it doesn't, i add comments.
That’s awesome dude!
What did you like so I do more of it
@@PecaCS Bro the idea on how you just made it in plain english.
This language doesnt seem all that bad at all and could really help people learn coding! Reminds me of programming OpenAI API tools/functions.
Do you have advice on what I should focus more on
i dont think they are put off by the syntax, everyone learns it eventually, even myself being a beginner, i never got a hard time learning syntax, and I memorised them as i kept using them
I can bet there is at least one person that gets put off from the syntax. I am trying to help that person.
@@PecaCS And that person would be me+7.5 billion other humans that find it extremely difficult to understand stupid ass syntax code while juggling to understand how to even form the logic syntactically all because past programmers thought it wasn't cool enough to fix this horrible issue. These high lvl programming languages should only be shrouded/covered up for hardware/software to run on and let us have human languages like prolog & E++ that we can actually understand so we can get shit done faster. I hope this gets the attention of Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Subbed.
@@BlakeTedKord I don't think English+ would really be of much help, as it's basically a syntactical wrapper around javascript, a language with famously stupid semantics, and with less ability to ensure the code is correct
I feel like this language has some potential, but perhaps something like chatGPT (or another ai) could help interpret your commands so that there is a little bit of fluidity in your sentence writing? It would be annoying if it got something wrong though.
I don't think programming syntax is all that hard to read, especially when your target audience is programmers (which it will be in a software engineering environment). Rather, it's the thought process behind why code was written a certain way. There's no need to explain that `add(x, y)` adds two numbers, but you would need to explain why you used that instead of writing `x + y`.
Very cool! Throughout time the syntax of a language has only become more readable by making it closer to english language. I wonder though if the effectiveness of making a language closer to english is not linear and perhaps a bell curve. Meaning there is a point in which a language's syntax is most effective thus making it closer to english decreases its effectiveness and vice versa. This concern is only more valid as I read the other points made against this in the comment section.
My focus is not on the effectiveness. I am focusing on changing the way we interact with code. To create such a new perspective and then someone else get’s inspired and makes a better version which is what people would actually use.
@@PecaCS Effectiveness should 100% be the main goal otherwise why would people spend the time and energy to learn this language if it is ultimately just a lateral switch or worse, the syntax makes you less effective.
Tbh this sounds realy intresting
You actually have it backwards. The languages are defined to be easy for humans to understand. If we wanted to make it efficient for machines, we'd be writing 0s and 1s, as in the end, that is how they are consuming it (after going through a few layers of compilation / transpiling / interpretation).
Languages like c++, c#, python, or every other language. Are all simpler to learn than english, since you only need to learn the key words.
But that’s the thing, we have to learn them, no matter how much simpler it is. Each one has a different syntax, it starts to add up. Most projects rely on multiple languages. We already know English and it will be used in place of every other language. That’s my viewpoint.
@@PecaCS I'm not a big fan of expecting people to understand English. You end up with a world in which native English speakers dominate. Most computer languages are much more universal and less biased towards people who happened to be born in a certain place.
But you can easily write in another language with English+. The config is written by the user. You can program probably in Japanese as well.
@@PecaCS I learned a regular programming language through Spanish resources way before I started to learn English. The problem stands. And in fact it's now way bigger, since learning natural languages is much more difficult and time consuming. You can learn N mainstream programming languages by the time you finish learning a natural language. Maybe N=10 is a logical number? It depends on how the language is designed, so on how much of the natural language you need to learn. But regular programming languages are much easier to learn, read, and write to begin with.
There's not even the need to read code, but simply to scan it - as their specific and well-defined semantics can only mean one or a few things, and the syntax lacking of unnecessary words renders a clearly visible and understandable structure at a quick glance. To solve this many languages problem, we can standardize any regular programming language, and forget everything else. Can we? Of course not! We wouldn't even be able to standardize one and only "English programming language", as people will keep creating "better variants" of it.
Damn Ive been writing Code in arabic all this time you saved ne frfr
With English+ you can probably write code in Arabic as well. Would be interesting to test out
is there a download for compiler for this languge pls
I expected a shitpost but this is pretty cool. The basic idea of "the comment is the function name" is very similar to Gherkin, although that language is built for a specific purpose and lacks most of the features of a general purpose programming language.
Thank you. How were you introduced to Gherkin? Have you recently used it?
@@PecaCS I was introduced to Gherkin at a previous workplace and still use it now. It's a domain-specific language for test automation sequences; the idea is that test engineers and their stakeholders can both reason about and discuss the program w/o knowing the underlying language. One difference is that the "comments" are not meant to describe what the program is doing but what is happening to the UUT (unit under test) during the program, and use a 3A or Given/When/Then notation.
One issue that comes to mind w/ Gherkin is namespacing, or how to prevent name conflicts when two operations can be described very similarly. Some Gherkin runners push everything to global namespace, while others require descriptions to be explicitly linked to the files in which they are used. I wonder if you've thought about this
I had a problem like that with describing creating a function. A function can have no arguments, one argument, etc. my solution was the naive one to just describe each one separately. So if I need a function with 4 arguments I have to first describe what that is even though I have a very similar description of what a function with 3 arguments is.
There's a similar PL called Espro
I hope you will do a video about how you made English+
There is already a video. See the pinned comment. I share day by day what happened.
Great video
To the computer it must be equally abstract as the high level programming languages so why not🤷♂️👍
What do you mean
isnt Ruby written like a haiku? thats its gimmick right?
Anyways, this is amazing. I hope it catches on. i know other languages that are kind of jokey like the Recipe Language where you print "hello world" like - 2 eggs, one pancake, eat pancake or something. Its wild.
Tbh there is a very cool way to easly translate any language to any code. Chat GPT can do it for you, so you can make anything you want even with very basic knowledge. Imagine if there was some advanced AI-based language that could directly translate any language (the real language the way we use it) to actual code, skipping all the half measures like computer languages etc. So for example, you just type "make a calculator app", AI knows what you mean and makes it, then you can adjust more complex features just by typing stuff like "add a small border around the buttons", "make the background black", ... and voila, it's done. This could be the real future of programming.
I think that the worst part about this is that your first language isn't even english. There's of course the democratizaction of programming that's already been done like with chat gpt, or the 2 width space but honestly i can't even get past the iron of this being english in particular
Why is it the worst part
2:18 , so, it's just Chef?
Is there a way we can play around with English+?
Currently no way because while playing around there is a high chance a bug I don’t know about can come up that has to be fixed. I don’t want people to get more frustration than help while using English+. Not ready for public use.
@@PecaCS I can understand. I'll try to keep up.
I quite like the idea behind E++, BUT: it is not suitable for big projects because of the gigantic "mass" of text you have to write. I think it's nice for helping you understand the logic behind, say, an algorithm or a small codebase. But when it gets to the point of working with it, really using it, I imagine it being quite annoying to write that much for what it results in. And still, it is a cool and interesting concept, and I think it has potential to grow and being used for educational purposes. 👍
if pseudo code actually does something
Programming languages are for humans, not for machines, because machines understand only machine code. We use these languages instead of natural ones because natural languages just (obviously) were not invented for writing programs and are not really convenient for that purpose. Even your invention is not english, it is some english-like programming language with strictly defined syntax without many exceptions and details that english has. And obviously you can't compile my comment with it. And, by the way, as someone already said in comments, you basically reinvented COBOL :)
I'm not hating or something, just expressing my thoughts, English+ is an interesting idea anyway. Good luck with your projects!
I think you can add more syntactic sugar an call it English#.
How would syntactic sugar look like in English+
most original idea ever
What makes it original
Hello please is the software ready for download?
What are our plans for it? What is your experience with programming? What if you encounter a bug while using it
Wonderful video! Do you happen to be Bulgarian too? I noticed your accent😅