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Here's a cool programming language in a live-coding environment that I developed with my interns two summers ago. It enables natural language programming which

Here's a cool programming language in a live-coding environment that I developed with my interns two summers ago. It enables natural language programming which is great for introducing young kids to computer science. It is built in Java and uses a recursive descent parser to parse sentences like "draw a red circle at 300, 300", and is well commented because the intention was for advanced students at my education program to be able to easily extend and hack on it. https://github.com/techlabeducation/pseudocode https://github.com/techlabeducation/pseudocode

Animats 9y ago
That idea runs into scaling problems quickly. See COBOL-60 and HyperTalk, which are are surprisingly similar. A useful question: you want to talk to a computer conversationally, and get beyond the Alexa/Siri level of tasks. How would you do that? Fully general natural language requires strong AI. Could you come up with some more restricted form with enough expressive power but understandable by a computer? The computer might have to rephrase your questions and ask "did you mean...?" Come up with a way to converge when the understanding is poor, and you'll have something.
- sitkack 9y ago
  Correctable dead-ends are better educationally than crafted successes. I don't think the goal is to teach students how to parse english, or making a conversant programming language, but it could show why programming languages use something other than natural language.