Business programming
June 7th, 2010 | Published in Uncategorized
Adam wonders what I mean by a language “optimized for business programming,” and I can’t really blame him because I’m not sure myself. However, my thinking isn’t really going the direction he guessed.
It may be nothing more than “a language that feels familiar to programmers coming from COBOL or Natural.” Languages like Java and PHP have gotten a lot of leverage out of having a “familiar, C-like syntax” (even if I always thought that was like saying, “familiar, IRS-like customer service”) and there is probably some value in providing this kind of familiarity. My main motivation in suggesting a Natural-like language that integrates with the JVM or CLR was as a migration path for legacy Natural programs.
I have a feeling, though, that mere familiarity is only part of it. Most programming languages are developed by people with relatively strong mathematical backgrounds, and I have the impression that they are in some sense “too mathematical” for people with a strong business focus.
I don’t know if this would actually work, but here are some ideas about a “business-optimized” language:
- Give variables value semantics. While you can often ignore the issue, I suspect that variables with reference semantics cause problems for lots of people.
- Include tolerance for redundancy. Programmers are usually lazy (and in fact I think unwillingness to do extra work helps make for better programming) so in Natural we usually write “READ EMPLOYEES BY PERSONNEL-ID”, but we can write “READ ALL RECORDS IN FILE EMPLOYEES IN LOGICAL SEQUENCE BY PERSONNEL-ID”. Human languages have lots of redundancy for good reasons, and if we allowed more in programming languages it might help, at least in reading comprehension.
- Segregate higher-level abstractions from basic capabilities. We want a language with coroutines, functions as objects, etc., but it should be easy to write simple programs without dealing with them.
I realize that these ideas might actually make things worse, but who knows.
(In response to Ross’s comment, I would like to develop an Adabas library for Python at some point. I’m just not sure if that’s really best.)