O'Reilly's OnLAMP blog had an interesting article this morning entitled The Broken Metric of "Intuitive to the Uneducated" Language Syntax which I found very interesting. chromatic is a Perl programmer, and his argument comes from that background. I'll admit that I'm among those developers who say things like "I don’t like to read punctuation" but at the same time, I'll completely agree with him. The basis of a language should not be how easy it is for an unskilled user to pick up and use. And no, this is not about my worries for job security by some "silver bullet" programming language making everyone a programmer

The basic idea of the O'Reilly post is this: In english, I can say "Get out of here!" Depending on my intonations, my facial expression afterwards, and my body language, that phrase could mean many things. It's about the semantic application of the syntax that allows for proper handling by recipients.

Here's a great example: I work everyday in PHP. I work in web applications, and while I write in many other languages in my spare time, I feel most experienced with the standard web application languages (PHP, CSS, XHTML, JavaScript). With minimal training, anyone can learn to develop applications with PHP. It's easy. There's not much linking, compiling, and general headache that most compiled languages require, and there's NO learning curve when it comes to using outside libraries. It's just a simple include('foo.php'). The vast array of builtins also means that whatever you want to do is probably already at your disposal. The problem with PHP is exactly those things that make it so easy to work with as well. All of those modules, builtins, and tools all live in the same namespace. Many functions are merely aliases for other functions. The barrier to entry to PHP development is low, but the amount of expression is also low.

Until I decided to venture out of the php world though, I didn't realize any of this. I had no understanding of character encodings or proper design patterns. Why? Because PHP takes care of it all for you. Put your markup and logic in one file, who cares? Shoot, I care. My brain's context switching between HTML and PHP is taxing. PHP takes care of so much stuff for you that you never really know what you're actually saying.

I've been going through the MIT OpenCourseWare recently, and the first class they teach you in the Computer Science department is all about expressing algorithms in computer code. They start you out with Scheme, which I had heard many zealots talk about, but have never felt to go out and learn it. Now that I am learning it, I see it's power. Scheme allows expression, but the syntax is incredibly simple. You simply cannot become an expert in Scheme by becoming an expert in its syntax. That's not where the power is. Bob Poweruser definitely couldn't just pick up Scheme (or any variant of Lisp) and figure it all out in a few days. The simple lack of a for loop would stop even the most advanced un-programmers.

Learn another spoken language, and this will make even more sense. The ability to express what you're saying is more important than just saying it. Having that flexibility will prove incredibly helpful in the long run.