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Hello, fellow programmer!

Here at the Osmosian Order of Plain English Programmers, we prefer to use our own software whenever we can. (The GitHub wiki editor I'm using to write this very post, for example -- a primitive edit-here/preview-there/go-back-to-make-corrections kind of thing -- is not what I'd expect to be burdened with more than a decade into the 21st century. Why isn't this thing what-you-see-is-what-you-get? You know, like the word processors we had on machines with just 128 kilobytes of memory, way back in 1985? And what's with, "If you want to create a line break, end a line with two or more spaces, then hit Return/Enter"? God help us!) But I digress. We also have a very strong aversion to doing our work more than once. So we produce new versions of our Plain English compiler using previous versions of our Plain English compiler, and we use the page layout facility that is built-in to our integrated development environment for all of our documentation, marketing materials, etc. Except, unfortunately, for posts like this one...

And thus you can see that we realize it's not a perfect world, and that there are times when we have to communicate with others in ways that are more common though decidedly less desirable. We've therefore chosen to use a very small portion of Adobe's Portable Document Format as a means of making our proprietary-format documents more readily accessible, and ".zip" files for moving our complete software packages around. We stand firm, however, on the principle that installation programs should never be required, and that removing our software from a system should require nothing more than deleting the downloaded files (which are conveniently enclosed in a single directory).

That said, here are the links to our Manifesto, our Plain English Programming instruction manual, and the complete development system, including the source code:

The Osmosian Manifesto: www.osmosian.com/manifesto.pdf

Instructions and reference materials: www.osmosian.com/instructions.pdf

The complete system for Windows: www.osmosian.com/cal-3040.zip.

Take a look at the Manifesto (just two pages) and see if you're intrigued. If you are, download the Instruction Manual, send it to your printer (it's only a little over a hundred pages) and go for a walk (it's not healthy to spend all your time in front of a computer). Then get a drink, settle into your favorite easy chair, and peruse the stuff that came off your printer. Enjoy the jokes and the clever references to our hero, the HAL-9000. Note the elegance of the layout where nary a sentence crosses a page boundary. Get a feel for what a truly simple but effective system looks like. Then download the whole shebang, unzip it, and recreate our sample Monet-style painting program for yourself -- perhaps even print a couple of the paintings it produces for framing on your walls.

If you're not hooked after doing that -- or if you didn't do what I suggested -- well, then you're not the kind of person the Osmosian Order of Plain English Programmers is looking for. May God help you to see over the edge of the box.

Questions and comments can be directed to help@osmosian.com or to me directly, gerry.rzeppa@pobox.com. Until we meet again, then, I am,

Gerry Rzeppa, Aging and Hairy-Eared Grand Negus of the Osmosian Order of Plain English Programmers

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