We've already got people in South America working on Plain Spanish, a guy in Portugal looking into Plain Portuguese, and a Russian friend of mine thought that Plain Russian would be a good idea but he doesn't have time to pursue it at the moment. So yes, we like the thought that people everywhere can program as they naturally think, in their native tongues.

I'm a very old fashioned programmer. When I was a kid - age 10-11, like 25+ years ago, with an Atari and Commodore 64 - there was no internet, no books or references. Back then, you had to be really good at it. Nowadays, everyone and their grandma does programming. Sadly, it has transformed from "think and write code; be unique, be you" to "look for code to copy and paste; walk the line; don't think for yourself".

How can "we" (language creators) copy when no one else writes code in our languages?

PS: My favorite language designer is Niklaus Wirth.

Great! And we already have a tool for translating from one language to other: Google Translator. This way, the portability problems will be solved entirely.

Can we get a language that uses Queen's English?

Plain "Language" programming can be fun! Especially if you are the type of person who likes to learn new Languages.

I guess one can forget syntax highlighting already as it is a book rather than a program.

The error messages will be like...

Functions will now be named chapters. It can also include glossary instead of comments!

It could also be used as a tool for learning other Languages since its forces the user to write books with no mistakes at all.

Unlike most visual artists, I see, acknowledge and respect the "art" in your code

Programming since 10-11 years old, 26-27 years ago.

One of the biggest misconceptions people have is that it's YOUR personal language. I strongly disagree with this. It's just English with real semantics and there's no personal decision involved. It understands whatever you program it to do. Typical programmer's blame the language for their mistakes/fault; in other words, they blame the instrument for their inability to use it correctly.

You should be proud of yourself to have such an intelligent son

My daughter is 19 years old and she does Java 3D game programming, though I rarely ever see or talk to her I taught her how to program in Borland C++ DOS 3.1 at age 6-7.

AppleScript sort of tried to attempt this - and it's predecessors I think. What was that called? Something-Talk? I don't remember.

I think the artist part sometimes makes us see things that other programmers (more strongly left-brained and mathematically inclined), sometimes miss. For example, almost everyone on programming sites tells me we got the precedence rules wrong in Plain English (ours is left-to-right only). Yet when I ask almost any native English speaker (who is not a trained programmer) what "3 plus 2 times 5" is, they always say, 25 (not 13).

KevinN:But Gerry didn't just try and fail. He succeeded in making a real nice English programming language, what we've all dreamed of.

This is really a fascinating project - I really like when new approaches to programming are designed and implemented in such a beautiful way. As a mathematician I have a inclination to play with cryptic languages (even esoteric ones), but I see and appreciate the beauty in many different approaches.

I also have a Pascal background (I learned it much earlier than C, and I learned assembly by writing inline assembly functions in Turbo Pascal) - and I agree wholeheartedly that there is something different in how people reared on Pascal approach the programming when compared to people that started with C-like ones.

Since you mentioned mathematically inclined programmers I would like to share another similar story about the precedence rules that shows that mathematicians may also not be exactly in the same "category" as the usual programmers of today. There was a controversy over my choice to assign unary minus the same precedence as subtraction - my mathematical background has influenced me there, because for mathematicians it is usually more natural to expect that such minus sign has lower priority than multiplication or power no matter whether there is some other term before it or not (you can see examples of this reasoning here and here). I'm under impressions that the dominance of languages derived from C has made it that most programmers today may have a different intuitions.

From a "person on the street" perspective -- a perspective that we Plain English programmers constantly attempt to cultivate -- it's clear that a dash in front of a number is not an operator at all: it's part of the number itself. "Five" is a number, and "minus five" or "negative five" is another, different number. No ordinary person thinks of negative five as a positive five that has been negated; they simply think of it as a different number.

I have a degree in math myself -- with honors, no less -- and yet I can't quite bring myself to trust the stuff as others do (though I readily admit its practical value in many areas). Case in point: math tells me that the hypotenuse of a right triangle with one side 3 units long and another 4 units long is 5 units long; but it also tells me that the hypotenuse of a right triangle with two 1-unit sides is a number that no one has ever been able to exactly quantify; a different KIND of number altogether. Yet I know that when I draw such triangles on graph paper, or cut them out of wood with my miter saw, the experience is the same whether the line (or cut) is a simple integer, a real number, an irrational number, etc. So I'm forced to conclude that the mathematical model is defective and thus not to be entirely trusted -- it is, after all, just a model, right? the reality is the triangle on the paper and the wood on the saw.

This is really a fascinating project - I really like when new approaches to programming are designed and
implemented in such a beautiful way.

The thing I would like to pass on to the next generation is the kind of "joy" it was to program back when
systems were simple enough so you could understand them, top to bottom, without years of study.
I'm thinking a stand-alone Plain English system-on-a-stick might fit the bill, especially if the operating system
was also written primarily in Plain English. I'm just feeling a little old to start digging back into all that
hardware-specific stuff, especially when hardware is such a moving target these days.

This demonstrates that to some degree everyone is a mathematician now; after all, the concept of negative numbers was introduced by mathematicians relatively late in our history.

...I just wanted to point out that there may be more that just two points of view here, and that characterization of the current "mainstream" of programming as mathematically inclined may not be fully accurate.

Yes, mathematical constructions are always just models that we created to mirror some aspects of our reality. I don't think this should be discouraging - but it is good to remember the underlying assumptions of each model that we want to use. For example, the geometry you used in the above example has an assumption that everything can be scaled and divided ad infinitum - and it the consequence of this assumption that to measure the hypotenuse we may need a number that is only obtainable through infinite calculations. If we used a different model - based on assumptions that perhaps space is quantized (after all, the quantum physics may give us a good reason to think that it is so) and you can get down to basic "pixels" of reality - then you could end up with metrics where every length would be a nice natural number. We simply choose a model that works best for us under the circumstances (including the preference for model that requires less effort). And I think that trusting the mathematics is sensible as long as you are aware of all the assumptions.

The current CAL-3040 "shebang" is an excellent system. However, a proof of concept would like further development.
Please open source the code with a permissive license...

I'm still at the mercy of the author as far as distributing my original Plain English code for the SudoCode compiler...Personally, I would like to produce binaries for small standalone systems (hobby OS, standalone bootable programs, etc) written in Plain English.

The problem I have with open source licensing in general, and "crowd coding" in particular, is that a program
quickly ceases to be what it was intended to be; quickly ceases to be itself.

Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders>
This software is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied warranty. In no event will the authors be held
liable for any damages arising from the use of this software.
Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any purpose, including commercial applications, and to
alter it and redistribute it freely, subject to the following restrictions:
1. The origin of this software must not be misrepresented; you must not claim that you wrote the original software.
If you use this software in a product, an acknowledgment in the product documentation would be appreciated but
is not required.
2. Altered source versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not be misrepresented as being the original
software.
3. This notice may not be removed or altered from any source distribution.

I hereby officially grant you, Mike Gonta, my personal permission to do whatever you'd like with the CAL-3040,
its source code, and its documentation, for as long as you shall live.