You are probably right about that. I think that is also why it is used for large complicated projects. It may also be the reason why it is preferred to C for large projects.

It's not intuitive, the word "add", like most of the rest of human language, is ambiguous. Its actual meaning depends on context. What if your example said "Add ItemName to Receipt", what would "add" mean then? All of a sudden the exact same command switches from a mathematical sum to appending a new entry onto a list. Or does it? Maybe it's still a mathematical sum using the ASCII codes for the characters in ItemName? I don't know. That's the problem.

From the sound of it, you're taking "human-readable" to mean "looks like English-speak". That doesn't make it more readable. It makes the words and symbols more familiar, but the added ambiguity actually makes it less readable IMO.

This is why computer languages are written the way they are, to remove ambiguity. To write computer programs in "normal speak" brings about all of the problems with ambiguity that we face in our daily lives. No thank you. We have enough variations of the phrase "What?" "I don't understand" "What do you mean?" "Come again?" in normal communication, keep that crap out of computer programs.

You still didn't answer what on god's green earth "PIC 9(4)." means.

The next time punchy starts a language war thread, my reply will be "stop starting language war threads." I'm just going to say that now.

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Sure but I would say the same about I think you're being a bit disingenuous here, InvoiceTotal is clearly a sum (if it's not, ).

I agree with suicidaleggroll that the PIC thing is rather cryptic, I guess (again from the names chosen) it means some kind of character type? I thought the numbers would indicate max/min length except then it makes no sense to have 99 on DayOfBirth. And what's with the numbers that appear to be indicating the indent level?

How would you add a new number to a bunch of numbers in Cobol then?

I don't know that the OPs original question meant anything, beyond starting a language war, like dugan says.

Fair enough...

Change it to "Add ItemAmount to Invoice" then.

I think human-readable is a very misleading term. The point of programming is that you have to be able to describe what you want to do in an exact way. Everyone is able to sort numbered pieces of paper in an ascending order if you ask them to, but not all of them can describe the algorithm they used to do it. But if you can't explain it to yourself, you can't program it. Sometimes I think some people are thinking "high-level", or "human-readable" language means the compiler will understand (their) natural language and know what they meant even if they don't. But high-level is not an adequate substitute for being able to put the logic together. Leave computation to computers and thinking to human beings. Programs trying to guess what you meant rather than do what you wrote tend to result in a very poorly predictable behavior. When google gives me what it thinks I want instead what I asked for when I actually do know what I want is annoying, but if I was forced to use a programming language that behaves like that, I'd probably jump out of the nearest window.

Ada has a very human readable syntax.

Rebol is also very readable, can generate even more human friendly DSL's easily and is *very* lightweigt.
Red (red-language.org) is its successor and has the same advantages, but will be even more powerful than Rebol.

Personal preference, I rather think of it as in what language can you write code that is easily portable to other languages. For example, you can cut and past BASIC right into the old Microsoft .ASP files. With very few tweaks you can quickly convert it to PHP. Likewise you can call BASH from PHP. A good example of what is NOT portable is the new Microsoft .ASPX files. But then again, when Microsoft released its plans for .NET in the late 90's was when I decided I needed to learn Linux! Total insecure ..... better stop there, got absolutely nothing good to say about .NET

The most easily read language I've used was Pascal. Pretty straightforward. But it's not in much use these days. Ada is very similar, but never had wide adoption outside NASA AFAIK.

I wonder why nobody has brought up Smalltalk in this discussion. I would think that any language that is used to teach programming to kids (Smalltalk, Logo, ...) would fit the description of "human readable" best, if "human readable" is defined as "easy to understand for people with no knowledge of the language".

C# is what most applications are written in. C# replaced C and C++. VB or Java would be on the list. CSS would be on the list because of web site. Cobol, Pascal and Fortran are still used.

Human readable? Some doubt programmers are humans. I can look at most code and figure out the syntax. I can tell you what the code does. I have been programming 30+ years. C# with visual studio took the fun out of writing code. It was an art in the 1980s. With Java and Visual Studio anyone can write code. It takes a good programmer to make it elegant instead of spaghetti.

^ isnt c still dominant ? at least for linux (i have never come across c# source code).

Is that still true even on Windows?

It's not the language but the way the code is written that makes the code readable or not.

Almost any language that permits well defined programming structures, long variable and function names, suitable indenting etc can be used to create readable programs.

Ideally, you should be able to take pseudo-code and translate it directly into the language you are using without any restructuring of the code.