Help me with my essay/talk on programming?

[Cody Pendant]

I've written a short talk on programming languages, intended not for a programming audience, but for an audience interested in languages, who'll be thinking about "does a programming language have verbs/nouns?" and so on.

I don't want to post my first draft publicly, but would anyone like to read it and tell me if I've made a complete fool of myself?

Your motivation, if you're interested, is that I've turned it into a plug for Perl by the end, and I don't want to let down the Perl community by association!

Please email me at [e-mail] if you'd like to help.

[Lawliet]

Well, I am interested in reading it but I'll wait for the final draft. (Unless, of course, you feel like /msg'ing me with a link to it.)

[NateTut]

One comparison that I'd suggest is the creativity of both programming languages (especially Perl) and human only languages. Just look at all the creative obfuscated posts, Perl poems, song lyrics written in Perl, not to mention all the creativity that happens daily in normal coding. Sometimes the "laity" think of programming as dull, boring and as far from creative as it gets. If they only knew how wrong they are.

[Anonymous Monk]

Perl, not so much a language as a culture. Culture, medium used to grow bacteria. Verbs - bind, chomp, chop, pop, push, shift, splice, open, rename, die, m/ /, &doSomething( ) etc. Nouns - $variable, $objectRef etc. Colloquialisms/synonyms - $_ @_ $0 $! etc. Conjunctions - if, and, or &&, || etc. adjectives - eq, ne etc. Making a coherent sentence or talk from the above double dutch, could be fun, but I haven't got time sorry.