Why Aren't Computer Programming Languages Designed Better?

Around 1981, in the early days of Personal Computer World, one of the very early UK personal computer magazines, there was an article which it seems I will never forget. The journalist excitedly expounded on a new application that was being written, called "The Last One", or TLO. The idea was that the application understood a business requirement expressed in English, thereby making all other application development languages/systems redundant.<p>Safe to say, we're still not there yet.<p>P.S. also in PCW, a great magazine in its day, was another article about a program that could keep compressing files repeatedly to make them really small. I haven't see that yet, either.

This is an interesting article about how non-programmers see it.<p>What the author fails to understand is the difference between having a steeper learning curve versus less verbosity. When you read and write code all day long, you don't really pay much attention to syntax, it's just there to shape the logic.<p>In order to learn, it's okay to have a more familiar pseudo-code to get a feel of what programming is like. But I wouldn't want to write that code all the time.<p>An english-like syntax has already been introduced: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#Verbose_syntax" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#Verbose_syntax</a>