The XGO Programming Language

by quux0r • 2 months ago

8 1 2 months ago

XGo is a programming language that reads like plain English

This is possibly the most dangerous sentence on this entire page. The hubris and ignorance of history wrapped up in this one sentence is breathtaking.

We've been trying to do "plain English" programming for 50-odd years. COBOL was supposed to be a programming language for business critters. BASIC was going to eat the world. We were going to UML our way out of writing software. Over and over and over again, it's been proven that there is irreducible complexity in programming that can't just be converted to "plain English" in a way that's meaningful to actual laypeople. AI has, in some ways, reduced the barrier to getting software from zero to one, but it's not a replacement for knowing how to code beyond the very basics.

The more I read of this page, the less I understand what's happening here. None of the examples show anything resembling "reducing the difficulty" of programming; it's still abstract symbols mapping to operations on a silicon chip people fundamentally can't reason about without training and practice. There's no universe in which

  a <- 5, 6, 7

is so significantly easier to read than

  a = append(a, 5, 6, 7)

that it's going to fix that programming as a discipline is not natively easy for people to do. It's like the author never _talked_ to a newbie before making these decisions. A new programmer doesn't know what a "string" is. They don't understand why there are so many curly braces and equals signs and colons. The word "variable" isn't common vernacular unless you have at least a decent high school math education, and even then, the programming usage is very different than the math usage.

I don't know why this makes me so angry. Maybe it's because the pedagogy of software engineering is important and interesting to me, and projects like this are the latest generation of a long line of people believing they have finally figured out the secret formula to make coding "easy". It's just...never going to be easy. That's the nature of complex systems.

The XGO Programming Language

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