English Words Used In Programming Languages
When it comes to talking about programming, it seems that the closer the programming language is to English, the tougher it can be to talk about it sometimes.
Case in point in class right now: You have words like "this" built into the Java programming language. We're writing a method that refers to "whatever object we're working with" as "this". Someone spoke the word "this" to refer to the method we are working on. The person he was talking to thought he was referring to the word "this" in the code.
Another example: In my previous post about my homework, I disambiguated the word "class".
I am all in favor of a language such as Python that is extremely English-like. That having been said, I suspect some programming languages look convoluted and non-English partly for this reason.
Comments
sllywhtboy on Feb. 19, 2009 2:36 AM
in conversation, i refer to the programming object of "this" as "this dot" to make it a bit less ambiguous
misterpib on Feb. 19, 2009 7:18 AM — "Arguments"
Here's a good example of the confusion of using English words: "Arguments."
My wife is learning to program, and she was confused because function arguments have nothing to do with arguing. I was blown away. I had never even thought about it in that way.
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