hyperscript has been a fun early project to watch https://hyperscript.org Essentially trying to replace javascript with a variant of hypertalk Docs: https://hyperscript.org/docs/ Follow via @htmx_org https://twitter.com/htmx_org/status/1371786116064440322

Ugh, it looks so cool (and htmx too), but I have a visceral negative reaction to any programming language that tries to look like English sentences. How irrational am I to think that will necessarily lead to doom somehow? Is there perhaps a systematic way to make sure it parses predictably while still having the writability benefits of resembling natural language? Is that even a problem in practice?

In practice people learn languages symbolically regardless, whether the syntax is "field of button" or "button.field" –  When I was 12, knowing hypertalk's

"send message 'abc' to card 'foo'"

and then encountering C's

foo->abc()

, it clicked immediately and my reaction was "cool!" – so for me at least it worked Parsing is the hyperscript programmer's problem, keeping a sane grammar – and others can probably hack around that grammar for a less talky syntax in the future

Parsing is everyone's problem. The user needs a fairly accurate mental model of how the parser works to be able to read or write their code. They have to parse it mentally to read it, and code is read more often than it's written.