Dave Thomas wrote a blog post on the problem with english-like programming languages to which I totally agree.

At some point, I was writing things with HyperCard and I hated it. Ok, it was working, I could create stacks and I forever missed the background feature in FileMaker.

The problem was just the scripting language: it used too much of my small brain.

Say you need to compute . This is how you do it with hypercard:

put the exp of x into c

And this is the ruby way:

c = Math::exp(x)

I really don’t like the part of my brain related to speech to interfere when I read code. Real phrases are full of emotions, stories, dreams, misunderstandings, pretty words, bad style. I don’t want this to mess up with code. I want to keep it for real life.

RSpec breaks my brain:

describe "(empty)" do

    it { @stack.should be_empty }

    it_should_behave_like "non-full Stack"

    it "should complain when sent #peek" do
      lambda { @stack.peek }.should raise_error(StackUnderflowError)
    end

    it "should complain when sent #pop" do
      lambda { @stack.pop }.should raise_error(StackUnderflowError)
    end
end