One of the major gaps in modern computing scene is a way for the everday user to program. Most people using computers in the 80s knew basic, but this is a trend that seems to have died. I'm just looking for opinions here. I know many coders who agree with me on this and I'm sure that we could get it done, but I feel the this isn't going to be much different than whats out there without feedback at every stage of the making, and we need it from the least geeky among us (Soprano, this means YOU!).
Perhaps, given what this is, the first thing I need to do is a little explaining. Programming is like writting a list of instructions for an absolute pillock, and having to do it with his idea of grammar instead of yours. The computer reads through these instructions one by one, and so long as they suit its rather limited sense of grammar. You must also remember the "pillock" bit, it has to be in simple little steps that the computer can understand.
I must be clear that these are just my ideas on what the language you would use to instruct the computer might look like. I need comments to make this better, now to my ideas.
One of the handiest instructions you can give to a computer is to tell it to output text. This is done with a print instruction (a throwback to the days before screens when computers were wired to typewriters for anything they needed to say.), so to tell the computer to say hello you would write:
print "Hello"
Fairly obvius right, but you should notice the quoting on the hello. You should also note the lack of full stops. I did say that computers have odd senses of grammar. Also, if you wrote this, the computer would move on to the next line after writing it. It wouldn't write anything there, but thats where it would its "pen" hovering. Computers get confused rather easily, so quoting is essential. Obviously this is just a trivial example. Consider this example:
remember name as text
print "Hello, what is your name?",
input to name
print "Hello ", name, " How are you"?
Few new things here. The "remember name as text" line tells the computer to set aside some of its memory for a block of text, named "name". This block of memory is called a variable, because the contents are able to vary, like the way we have a part of our memory remembering what day of the week it is, and this changes from day to day. "name" is said to be the name of the variable, in the same we we give names to facts we know (like "where I left my phone"). Note that "name" is not quoted in the code, the reason will be obvius in a minute. The next notable thing is the "input to name". This tells the computer to wait till the user types in something and then it stores what they type in in the memory that we set up with "remember". Then in the second print notice how we go in and out of quoting, and the commas. The commas say that there is more to follow, like they do in normal english. Also note the way name doesn't have quotation marks around it. This tells the computer to look for a variable named "name" and print that out. this is why we quote text we want to appear as is, so the computer doesn't go looking it up as if it were a variable name.