Is there a human readable programming language? [closed]

Answer 1

Inform 7

Inform 7 is perhaps the language I feel is most appropriately designed in a human language fashion. It is quite application specific for writing adventure games.

It is based on rule-based semantics, where you write a lot of rules describing the relationship between objects and their location. For instance, the section below is an Inform 7 program:

"Hello Deductible" by "I.F. Author"

The story headline is "An Interactive Example".

The Living Room is a room. "A comfortably furnished living room."
The Kitchen is north of the Living Room.
The Front Door is south of the Living Room.
The Front Door is a door. The Front Door is closed and locked.

The insurance salesman is a man in the Living Room. The description is "An insurance salesman in a tacky polyester suit. He seems eager to speak to you." Understand "man" as the insurance salesman.

A briefcase is carried by the insurance salesman. The description is "A slightly worn, black briefcase."  Understand "case" as the briefcase.

The insurance paperwork is in the briefcase. The description is "Page after page of small legalese." Understand "papers" or "documents" or "forms" as the paperwork.

Instead of listening to the insurance salesman: 
    say "The salesman bores you with a discussion of life  insurance policies.  From his briefcase he pulls some paperwork which he hands to you.";
    move the insurance paperwork to the player.

Example cited from Wikipedia

Answer 2

Having a programming language read like a (verbose) normal language, would be like requiring people to converse all the time in legalese. All the extra verbiage just gets in the way.

An ideal programming language should have syntax that is as transparent as possible and let the concepts behind the program stand out. Obviously there is a trade off between having a quick learning curve and having minimal but obscure syntax (think Perl, or even K).

Answer 3

Inform 7 is the most successful such system I've seen. It has two advantages over the cruder systems listed in other answers here: it's for a domain particularly appropriate for natural language (interactive fiction), and it does a fancier analysis of the input code based on more computational-linguistics lore, not just a conventional programming-language grammar that happens to use English words instead of braces, etc.

Answer 4

GradStudent

It only has one statement: "you - write me a program to do x"
It's valid for all values of X and has the advantage that x doesn't have to be defined and can be changed after the program is written.

A commercial dialect is available called intern: development cost is lower but it isn't guaranteed to work

Answer 5

Sure, Erlang.

-module(listsort).
-export([by_length/1]).

 by_length(Lists) ->
    F = fun(A,B) when is_list(A), is_list(B) ->
            length(A) < length(B)
        end,
    qsort(Lists, F).

 qsort([], _)-> [];
 qsort([Pivot|Rest], Smaller) ->
     qsort([ X || X <- Rest, Smaller(X,Pivot)], Smaller)
     ++ [Pivot] ++
     qsort([ Y ||Y <- Rest, not(Smaller(Y, Pivot))], Smaller).

I'm a human, it's a programming language, and I can read it. I don't know what any of it means, but I see a lot of English words in there, I think.

(Tongue firmly in cheek.)

Answer 6

SQL

SELECT name, address FROM customers WHERE region = 'Europe'