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“Citrine only ever cares about languages with prepositions” You’re confusing keyword/identifier localization for natural language. I agree with everyone who sa

by hhas01 6y ago

“Citrine only ever cares about languages with prepositions” You’re confusing keyword/identifier localization for natural language. I agree with everyone who says NL is the wrong problem to solve, but that’s not what Citrine is attempting to do. Look at it this way: Citrine code is NOT natural English either. At most, it is a sort of “pidgin English” where individual words can be readily understood but the grammar is wholly artificial. For instance, a Chinese or Japanese dialect should continue to use whitespace to separate identifiers. It’s a programming language, not a natural one, and that difference is the point. Trying to “fake it” leads to dead-end mistakes like AppleScript. Trying to do it for real creates exactly the sort of ambiguities and imprecision that a programming language is meant to eliminate. It’s about finding the right compromise between human accessibility and machine precision, and anything that breaks down barriers between the traditional US English-dominated programming world and the billions of humans who speak something else has got to be a step in the right direction.

lifthrasiir 6y ago
I definitely agree that localized languages can only reflect a subset of human languages (and it's of course true even for English-based languages), but that doesn't make my point moot. If the author did really care about other languages and wanted to pursue the fixed syntax, every identifier should have been strictly nouns or verbs and nothing else; for example (say) `animate(source: X, target: Y)` instead of `animate(from: X, to: Y)`.
- hhas01 6y ago
  “every identifier should have been strictly nouns or verbs and nothing else” Totally agree. TBH I don’t think the authors’ enthusiasm, while admirable, is quite matched by their knowledge and experience. A bit more up-front learning could probably save them disappearing down some obviously wrong paths. As you say, they should focus on verbs and nouns, and getting those to machine-translate precisely. Nailing that would be a big deal just in itself. If they later want to experiment with adding prepositions to make code read “more naturally”, make the system add those on a per-language basis according to per-language rules laid down by native-language speakers. Thus in English the method signature might present as `animate(from: source, to: target)`, because that’s what English readers expect and like. But that doesn’t mean that `from` and `to` should be translated to every other language, because that’s just an exercise in cutesy-clever nonsense, burying what is significant under what is not, and software already suffers from more than enough of that.

by hhas01 6y ago

lifthrasiir 6y ago

I definitely agree that localized languages can only reflect a subset of human languages (and it's of course true even for English-based languages), but that doesn't make my point moot. If the author did really care about other languages and wanted to pursue the fixed syntax, every identifier should have been strictly nouns or verbs and nothing else; for example (say) `animate(source: X, target: Y)` instead of `animate(from: X, to: Y)`.

hhas01 6y ago
“every identifier should have been strictly nouns or verbs and nothing else” Totally agree. TBH I don’t think the authors’ enthusiasm, while admirable, is quite matched by their knowledge and experience. A bit more up-front learning could probably save them disappearing down some obviously wrong paths. As you say, they should focus on verbs and nouns, and getting those to machine-translate precisely. Nailing that would be a big deal just in itself. If they later want to experiment with adding prepositions to make code read “more naturally”, make the system add those on a per-language basis according to per-language rules laid down by native-language speakers. Thus in English the method signature might present as `animate(from: source, to: target)`, because that’s what English readers expect and like. But that doesn’t mean that `from` and `to` should be translated to every other language, because that’s just an exercise in cutesy-clever nonsense, burying what is significant under what is not, and software already suffers from more than enough of that.