I use ColdFusion and would have to say at best CF is the worst of both worlds. For instance, to set a value you use '=', to check for equivalency you have to use 'eq'. Not sure how that qualifies as being close to natural language. In my mind they should be interchanagable. The most natural language like progamming environment I ever used was HyperTalk. A little verbose but it was very easy to read and teach yet powerful enough to do some fairly sophisticated projects.
You're confusing your numbers here. The numbers you quote for flu are US only, the numbers for the other diseases are world wide. So in 1918 500,000 people died in the US alone. World wide estimates vary widely, anywhere from 25-100 million. 20,000 people die in the US from flu every year making it the #1 killer for infectious diseases.
The interesting thing about the 1918 pandemic was that young, healthy people died from it at greater rates then older people. In the US you were 3 times as likely to die from it if you were between 20 and 35 then if you were over 60. Today, with the ease of world travel, a similar strain could have equally devastating results.
Not to nik-pic but HyperTalk always had a random number generator--random(). So not only was writing one in C a non-solution it was also a waste of time. Next time RTFM.
I totally agree. One thing that I haven't seen mentioned in this discussion was the way it could be extended by little compiled widgets called XFCNs and XCMDs. If HC didn't have some piece of functionality that you needed (or it was to slow when implemented as HyperTalk) you could whip one of these up in C or Pascal, stick it in the resource fork of a stack (or the HC app itself for global access),and call it from your scripts just like any other function or command. Allowed you to use compiled code where you needed it without having to worry about constructing a friendly UI.
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I use ColdFusion and would have to say at best CF is the worst of both worlds. For instance, to set a value you use '=', to check for equivalency you have to use 'eq'. Not sure how that qualifies as being close to natural language. In my mind they should be interchanagable. The most natural language like progamming environment I ever used was HyperTalk. A little verbose but it was very easy to read and teach yet powerful enough to do some fairly sophisticated projects.
You're confusing your numbers here. The numbers you quote for flu are US only, the numbers for the other diseases are world wide. So in 1918 500,000 people died in the US alone. World wide estimates vary widely, anywhere from 25-100 million. 20,000 people die in the US from flu every year making it the #1 killer for infectious diseases. The interesting thing about the 1918 pandemic was that young, healthy people died from it at greater rates then older people. In the US you were 3 times as likely to die from it if you were between 20 and 35 then if you were over 60. Today, with the ease of world travel, a similar strain could have equally devastating results.
Not to nik-pic but HyperTalk always had a random number generator--random(). So not only was writing one in C a non-solution it was also a waste of time. Next time RTFM.
I totally agree. One thing that I haven't seen mentioned in this discussion was the way it could be extended by little compiled widgets called XFCNs and XCMDs. If HC didn't have some piece of functionality that you needed (or it was to slow when implemented as HyperTalk) you could whip one of these up in C or Pascal, stick it in the resource fork of a stack (or the HC app itself for global access) ,and call it from your scripts just like any other function or command. Allowed you to use compiled code where you needed it without having to worry about constructing a friendly UI.