• Arthur Besse@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    i don’t usually cross-post my comments but I think this one from a cross-post of this meme in programmerhumor is worth sharing here:

    The statement in this meme is false. There are many programming languages which can be written by humans but which are intended primarily to be generated by other programs (such as compilers for higher-level languages).

    The distinction can sometimes be missed even by people who are successfully writing code in these languages; this comment from Jeffrey Friedl (author of the book Mastering Regular Expressions) stuck with me:

    I’ve written full-fledged applications in PostScript – it can be done – but it’s important to remember that PostScript has been designed for machine-generated scripts. A human does not normally code in PostScript directly, but rather, they write a program in another language that produces PostScript to do what they want. (I realized this after having written said applications :-)) —Jeffrey

    (there is a lot of fascinating history in that thread on his blog…)

  • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    Different brains.

    When I took over programming for my robotics team in highschool I switched from whatever visual flowchart bullshit they were using to robotc. I can’t make heads or tails of programming without actual words that literally say what the program does.

  • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    It took me looking at unfamiliar programming languages and realizing that I could read most of them without really knowing them for me to realize I probably could learn to at least read another language.

    It’s been years since then and I’m still probably shit at Spanish, but just like programming languages regular languages were made by humans to communicate with other humans, you’re capable of understanding any of them given a reasonable amount of time and guidance.