Comments on: Language and Metaphor: An Alternate View on Coding for the Web

By: Flash Forum

Flash Forum — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 08:34:56 +0000

Nice perspective!

By: Web Designer

Web Designer — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 15:31:40 +0000

Thanks for the article, Matt.

As a web developer who lives mostly at the coding end of site development, it is often difficult to communicate with clients who tend to think of a website simply as a flashy colourful and perhaps animated thing, rather than giving sufficient thought to the underlying form and function of a site design. Let alone give thought to repercussions of how underlying form will affect their business, their online presence and website accessibility.

By: Webs Developer » Smashing Magazine: The Poetics Of Coding

Webs Developer » Smashing Magazine: The Poetics Of Coding — Thu, 06 May 2010 18:30:35 +0000

[...] and restrictive. That’s an interesting metaphor. Recently, I’ve written about the different languages used by designers and developers, and also about the relationship between these coding languages [...]

By: The Poetics Of Coding - Smashing Magazine

The Poetics Of Coding - Smashing Magazine — Wed, 05 May 2010 13:35:25 +0000

[...] “Code Is Poetry.”That’s an interesting metaphor. Recently, I’ve written about the different languages used by designers and developers, and also about the relationship between these coding languages [...]

By: A Coder’s Journey | Spyre Studios

A Coder’s Journey | Spyre Studios — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 23:23:57 +0000

[...] has started to change that, though, as you can see in a pair of articles I wrote recently on the relationship between language and [...]

By: Amadou M. Sall

Amadou M. Sall — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 15:08:57 +0000

Awesome post, Matt. As a linguist who likes to dabble in coding (HTML and CSS – I always used to build my own sites, but now I’m all WordPress CMS!), I really enjoyed it.

By: Bert

Bert — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 19:23:40 +0000

Great post, I’m sure I will remember this when explaining my daily work to my grandparents the next time.

A query language example that i like is:

SELECT eggs, ham, coffee
FROM canteen
WHERE eat_by_date > curdate()

By: beyondwords | a blog for professional writers, editors, and designers » Blog Archive » 140+ Tweet Feed: Mar. 6-12

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:53:39 +0000

[...] and freelancer Matt Ward looks at the semantics of coding in this two-part series, which includes a metaphorical breakdown of coding languages and a look at the linguistic base of coding [...]

By: Taylor Frassinelli

Taylor Frassinelli — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 23:29:16 +0000

Were you using Espresso for your code demos?

By: Hornergraphic

Hornergraphic — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 09:21:31 +0000

Hey Matt, great post, highly informative and wonderfully accessible!

One statement from a developer that really helped me get my head around how do think about the language of code was to think of binary as the most tangible language, and English as the most abstract.

So, any development problem can be approached as the task of taking a statement in plain English first (a functional specification), the languages/directives can be defined second (a technical specification), and then the language can be written (the actual code).