Star Simpson

Separately but relatedly, how frustrating are error messages to beginners? Wouldn't you feel better w "sorry, please ask again differently?"

I never had an issue with commands and errors. I would probably find it more frustrating if the computer were "polite"

Aha yes. And you are a programmer?

I'm a finance prof. But I write code for research. Sometimes I'd like an empowering error message like "There's probably a way to do that."

That'd be great!

But saying you had no problem with commands personally doesn't mean that this wouldn't be worthwhile for someone else

Of course not! In fact many of my students have a fear of being told they are mistaken that I can scarcely understand.

Given Conway's Law, haven't machines been created in the mentality of the pioneers of computing? Are these languages not their languages?

Wouldn't, therefore, it make sense to explore programming languages that sound less oriented to "telling machines what to do"?

It's v difficult to compress these thoughts for twtr I'm just wondering if commanding language in some sense is a needless barrier to entry

And if perhaps in your social context you're more used to requests than commands, a programming language could be created in that context

Maybe this is all really out there or syntactic sugar or just too much social theory for real computing but hey, Twitter, just a thought

Basically this thought germinated when I did thishttps://twitter.com/starsandrobots/status/380857763733073920 …

It was pretty much a whim at the time but I felt this huge relief when I "please !!" instead of "sudo !!" - it fit better as language

I think of them as (1) not intimidating, (2) mechanistic, and (3) always hiding complexity and nondeterminism that may, may not matter atm.

I think this mindset is correct & required for programming. I'm wondering if modifying the language of programming cld guide one's mindset

So, I think that it COULD, and that it is a good idea. I think of this as the computer attempting not to be "human", but helping expose 1/n

the level of abstraction I'm NOT dealing with to the degree I need right then, and helping point me in the right direction. Even just 2/n

knowing WHERE in some source code I should poke around is an example of a huge win. segfault vs. stack trace is a huge difference! 3/3

Yeah! And I think these things are compatible