Glenn Vanderburg on teaching developer how to use Ruby testing APIs:
For example: I hate it when APIs (or languages, or whatever) are presented as "it's just English!" That doesn't give anyone anything useful to work with; it's just trying to allay fears, and it replaces a mythical danger (the thing people are afraid of simply because it's unknown) with a real danger: you're telling them they don't need to learn anything, when in fact the opposite is true.
I’ve never liked English-like APIs either. Consider that AppleScript is, bizarrely, completely unusable by people who know how to program in any other programming language.
If you think unpack “It’s just English” a bit, it’s easy to see why you should run away screaming from anything describing itself as being English-like in a good way. English is a human language riddled with inconsistencies. Many, if not most, English speakers learned it when they were young and the brain is almost useless for anything that isn’t language acquisition. Those who have learned English later in life become literate through lots of work, a healthy dose of necessity, and probably several years where their English was good enough for humans to understand but utterly confusing to a computer.
Just say “false” to “It’s just English”, coders!
