Well, this was just interesting.

I was talking to the DJ who comes on after me at WRIR about learning programming, and one of the things that came up is how frustrating I find the beginnings of programming books because I really want to begin with a grammar, basically. I want to know the structure of the language; they never want to tell me that. They just give me some shit that prints 'Hello, World' on the screen and they explain that they will later let me know why what I just compiled had that effect. It's possible that part of this is just the books I happen to have encountered, but in my experience with BASIC, Pascal, C, C++, and Visual Basic books, they never explain why the code takes the FORM it does.

I'm an English major. I am into knowing about the structure, not just the particulars. Just like I have no interest in those language-learning tapes that just have you repeat a bunch of phrases that will be useful, I don't have any interest in the rote memorization of random code. I want to know - the thing that kicked it all off - why some lines in C++ code have to end in semicolons and some don't.

This has been an incredibly long tangent introducing an article (it's short) describing someone's attempt to write a program that translates C code into standard English, because they feel code is speech and should be protected under the constitution. I just found it interesting to think about, probably because of the conversation about learning programming I had last night.

http://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol5_3/tpj0503-0012.html