The claims may be bold, but I wouldn't say they are lies.

Suppose you had a problem to solve. Approach A is to describe a solution to it in plain English that any layman can understand. Approach B is to describe a solution in pure machine-language code at the CPU instruction level.

At the end of the exercise, the CPU instructions probably occupy less bytes. But that does not mean that the machine-language solution was a more productive path. The productivity gain here has to do with the fact that it's very difficult for humans to think in pure machine code -- that's one major reason why we have programming languages in the first place.

Sure it's an intellectual accomplishment to conceive of the pure machine-code solution. It probably requires more skill than the layman version. It could execute orders of magnitude faster. But at the end of the day, is it more "productive?" No, not if the difficulty and specialized expertise to create it put that solution out of consideration.

I think we have to ask ourselves why programming is becoming more and more of an "ivory tower" profession. When computers were first introduced, everyone focused on learning BASIC in order to create software. Now we have people steering apps like Excel (at best), very few "programmers." Programming has all but disappeared from K-12 curriculums, and struggling in higher education. There have been many articles about this.

I think it's a good thing to have a language closer to English, that can appeal to a broader range of people.

Rev includes an XML library, standard.

The claim is "10x more productive" and the fact one isn't forced to struggle constructing and debugging a regex expression (which Rev actually supports as well) is part of the productivity boost. I find your one-liner examples to be time-consuming to compose, difficult to read, and undesireable to debug.

I guess what you're missing is that a lot of people consider things like

  r.readLine match { case null => s; case word => makeSet(r, s + word) }

to be impenetrable gobbledygook. The fact they have no interest in learning that kind of syntax is in no way connected to their ability to break large problems down into component parts, think logically, or come up with effective algorithms.

The company is based in Scotland. In British English, "per cent" is the preferred spelling.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_(spelling)

Interestingly, revTalk does also use "return" to return a value from a function, as shown at the end of the sortWord handler. But we have different meanings for words in English, too. I think it's nifty that he compiler knows how to evaluate these terms "in context."

FYI, one can use "cr" or "crlf" or "numtochar(13)" as synonyms for "return" in the context of strings, but I like "return." The idea of synonyms in code probably makes it that much messier and aggravating for some! :)

I'd like to see the 50 lines of BASIC code. (Which would be about twice as long.)

At least you agreed that with zero previous knowledge of the language, you could "already see what the code is trying to do." I think that would be true for even non-programmers, and is a testament to the self-documenting strength of revTalk.

The main idea here is that revTalk appeals to people who are not keen on traditional programming languages. It can therefore enable them to accomplish things they wouldn't normally consider trying, either because of the expense or time involved.

Aren't you making the point? Your examples of one-liners are not something I would consider "human-readable." It probably took a lot more effort to construct them, too. Why should a decent programming language require such byzantine constructions in order to be considered "real?"

I think there are two key advantages to revTalk.

1) It enables people who are not full-time programmers to undertake projects they normally wouldn't consider doing otherwise. It's possibly true that someone who knows a more traditional language could write something that executes faster or more efficiently, but if you reduce a five-hour process down to 10 minutes, you're still getting a significant boost in productivity, even if "real" programmer could write code that did the process in 3 minutes.

2) It is definitely more readable, and often shorter. As an example, there was a "readbility challenge" for coding a while back. The task was to write a routine that would determine all possible two-word anagrams given a starting word and a word list. See http://selfexplanatorycode.blogspot.com/

I can't post the code of the winning entry; Slashdot reports "Filter error: Please use fewer 'junk' characters. But you can find it here: http://www.reddit.com/r/sdcc1/comments/6wru4/leonardo/

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And here is the code in revTalk:

constant alphabet = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"
on mouseUp
  put "documenting" into sourceWord
  put url "http://someserver.com/wordlist.txt" into wordList
  repeat for each character c in alphabet
    if c is not in sourceWord then filter wordList without ("*" & c & "*")
  end repeat
  put sortWord(sourceWord) into sourceWord
  repeat for each line firstWord in wordList
    repeat for each line secondWord in wordList
      put firstWord & secondWord into testWord
      if the length of testWord is the length of sourceWord then
        if sortWord(testWord) is sourceWord then
          put firstWord && secondWord & return after anagramList
        end if
      end if
    end repeat
  end repeat
  put anagramList
end mouseUp

function sortWord theWord
  repeat for each character c in theWord
    put c & return after theSortedWord
  end repeat
  sort theSortedWord
  replace return with empty in theSortedWord
  return theSortedWord
end sortWord

It is shorter and (in my opinion) much more readable.

Western Union, I found out recently, requires IE7 to send a wire online. Firefox is not supported, no joke.

Obviously a lot of posts here about various email providers and strategies. You have some interesting requirements for your email which raise questions for me: - What's wrong with user@gmail.com? A ton of people I know list Google as their personal email address. As a brand, it beats yahoo, hotmail, and aol for professionalism. There are other services, but do you want to risk things on a fly-by-night? Just pick GMail and stick with it :) - Why not add IMAP to your company's email facility? Is it that the company is too big and you couldn't possibly influence this decision? Or too small, and you can't figure out how to do it? - Do you really want to conduct work-related business on an outside server? Look at the trouble Gov. Palin's getting for that. Having said all that then your main option is to just get a domain and pick a cheap plan from a decent-sized hosting business.