Comment Feasability and Readability (Score 1) 578
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/
--------
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.
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/
--------
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.
