People are going to lynch me for this, but those inventing pseudo-language are a bit silly. There’s already a perfect language for this: COBOL
Granted, my COBOL is incredibly rusty, so I probably can’t write code that compiles here, and it would be best to leave the division separators off, or, in fact, the whole data division, but:
MOVE 10 TO A
MOVE 20 TO B
MOVE B TO A
With a note that ‘MOVE leaves the first value intact’ if needed. (Or make it ‘COPY’ instead.)
In fact, this is basically what COBOL was designed for…having non-programmer readable programming language, and the reason it’s such a joke is that, as this article points out, that doesn’t actually work. Certain people simple cannot parse programming languages, no matter how simple the languages are.
It’s not a matter of intelligence, I’ve known very very smart people who passed programming course by ‘faking it’ by copying and pasting code they knew worked, and I’ve known pretty dumb-in-other-respects people who could write code just fine.
‘Sequence’ is a big one that programmers who have not tried to teach simply won’t believe, but there are people who simply do not order statements in their mind when evaluating them. They know to do it, they just look at blocks of code as a gestalt, and see a=10, and that’s the right answer. This isn’t due to intelligence or even knowledge level, it’s something like dyslexia. Just like people with dyslexia can manually go letter by letter to get a word, they can manually run them in order, but that’s very hard when loops or recursion or functions are involved.
There are, indeed, entire groups of people who cannot be programmers, will never be programmers, and really should be encouraged into some other line of work at the start of their programming education. Just like someone with dyslexia probably shouldn’t be a copy-editor.
Now, if someone wants to star in their own made-for-TV movie about how they overcame hardship to do what they loved to do, that’s one thing, but honestly, most of the people just heard their was a lot of money in computers, and should be firmly encouraged into law or something else where they aren’t going to always be struggling just to understand what’s going on.
Hrm. No preview. Well, let’s hope this is right.