Languages that free you from clarifying your ideas

Question

ok, so is there a programming language that frees you from clarifying your ideas?

I couldn't help asking. But if there is one, what would you say comes closest today?

Answer 1

That shouldn't be the role of a language, in my view. Instead, the language should help you to clarify your ideas, and let you express those clarified ideas in as intuitive a way as possible.

Answer 2

I hope there isn't a language that frees you from clarifying your ideas. It should be the responsibility of all programmers to do that themselves, not to pass it off to some other person or programming construct.

Answer 3

I don't think so, but there are a few that prevent you from clearly expressing those ideas - I nominate BCPL.

Answer 4

You could see it from two angles:

• High-level languages like Prolog free you from having to express every messy detail of your algorithm. You just sketch the high-level picture, and prolog fills in the details (e.g., how to do search and deduct the answers to your questions, etc).

• On the other side of the spectrum, low-level languages like C free you from having to express your ideas in an abstract way. You can just give a sequence of very concrete, detailed procedural steps (although you can optionally introduce abstractions if you want to).

So both extremes free you from certain aspects of expressing and clarifying your ideas.

Answer 5

You mean, a programming language that lets you program without explaining what you want the program to do?

No, how would that work? The compiler needs to be told what program to compile.

Digging out an old, somewhat appropriate quote from Charles Babbage:

On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

The compiler can't read your mind. The only way it can create a program to do what you want is to tell it what it is you want.

Of course, there are languages that free you from having to specify things that are irrelevant to your overall problem and are only relevant to the underlying implementation. (an obvious example is that most modern languages free you from having to worry about pointers or many other low-level concerns. Many languages also give you ways to iterate over sequences without having to write a manual for-loop. But you still have to "clarify your ideas", you still have to specify what your program should do. The best a language can do is free you from clarifying the things that are not relevant to your ideas.

Answer 6

For various problem domains, there are languages that free you from having to type a lot of stuff beyond what's necessary to clarify your ideas. But every language fails in some situations, and for some people. Not everybody is comfortable expressing their ideas in an object oriented design (say, C# or Java), as functions and closures (Scheme), as logical derivations (Prolog -- there are some problems for which it fits!), or as declarative statements of the desired result (XSLT, CSS, various DSL's, with varying success) -- yet each of these is the right answer in certain contexts, and most of them overlap to some extent. Indeed, few modern languages are all that purely oriented to single paradigms.

But some languages favour other things over expressiveness: such as having efficient implementations (C), or being easy to learn (say, Python or its scripting kindred).

Answer 7

All good points, was thinking more along the lines of scripting languages, where you can type away in the debugger until it does what you want (I've done that a time or two for some sysadmin wmi scripts).