The end result? Something tasty and presentable that has more value than the initial ingredients.

State is nasty. That’s one of the basic tenets of computer science/automata theory. But there are lots of ways to manage state and its concomitant complexity. You, my friend, seem to be just at the beginning of learning about the many ways this is done.

I see your PHP and raise you a MUMPS.

And I dont mean Perl – perl is ugly.
I refer to the generation of ruby and python (i mentioned ruby first because I prefer ruby, but I prefer python’s readability over perl’s line noise any time, even if some decisions in python are extremely awkward for me)

(For this matter, I will even include php, although php is the most horrible language ever created. It however shows that the www is extremely important, and even if you are such an ugly language you can win a LOT by trying to be simple in essence, and focusing on getting a job done. I dont think php would have ever survived
without the www though, and I am still sad that neither ruby nor python really tackle php’s strongest base – the www root. A solution like rails or django is totally the wrong way to beat php, for several reasons. Anyway, I digress with ranting… sorry)

Back to the point

“Teaching someone to program is a nice illustration of how impossibly weird this activity actually is, and how foreign it is the first time.”

I think with i.e. ruby, these things get a lot more natural in human thinking. Yes, you still have loops and if/elsif conditions, but at least you have your data structure easier accessible (easier to your brain)

array.each do |your_entry|
puts your_entry
end

(Though I’d prefer {} in the above case, but “do” is a nicer word for my brain and thus nicer to try to understand)

> Functions can contain any code, including calls to other
> functions. This is crazy for people. They just sort of freak out
> when they see functions calling each other and nesting inside of
> each other.

I think that depends on the way you think. In ruby, everything is a method, and if you have a cat like this:

class Cat # which obviously should be a cat

then I think everyone would understand models like this:

cat = Cat.new
cat.meow # the cat will meow
cat.hide # the cat tries to hide… what a coward
cat.move_legs # obviously, in order to move, the cat must move it legs
cat.run_away # a method which will invoke many other methods… run_away is a complex task, which may involve hiding, moving legs, meowing maybe if you want to alert a human “friend” etc… etc..

Ruby’s model is not a perfect real-life simulation. There are “multiple relationships” in reallife world, but ruby distinguish between a class and a module.
In such a way, a language like Io has a “purer model” (but personally I feel Io still has quite a way to go before it can really take off)

I think that the best new language would be one that stops
re-creating what other languages feature, and instead
concentrates on the human being. Objects are great to
work with but it still is not the best way for a human
THINKER.

C++ *is* the punch line.

Try another language. Most of them make more sense than C++.

The end result? Something tasty and presentable that has more value than the initial ingredients.