Signal City Archive Desk · in the spirit of COBOL (1959) and HyperTalk (1987) · back to the desk
This little language looks like English. It understands exactly six kinds of sentence: put 5 into x · add 3 to x · subtract 2 from x · multiply x by 4 · say x or say "hello" · repeat 3 times: say "hi". Edit the program and press Run. Then try saying it like a person would.
That's the gap the Archive Desk episode is about. For sixty years, "programming in English" meant languages like this: English-shaped, but strict. One extra word and nothing works. In the late 1970s Edsger Dijkstra argued that this strictness is the point, because ordinary language is too vague for machines. Today's AI tools close the gap a different way: you write real plain English, and the AI writes the strict code for you. That's how Signal City was built. Somebody still has to check what it wrote. Hear the episode: History No. 12, Coding in Plain English. Everything runs in your browser.