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Natural language is adapted for many tens of thousands of years to be used by groups of hunter/gatherers working together on a common task -- which also include

Natural language is adapted for many tens of thousands of years to be used by groups of hunter/gatherers working together on a common task -- which also includes arguing about related things like assumptions and priorities. In that context, physically pointing or showing things is important ("put it there"). As is also non-verbal feedback from expressions on people's faces or by where their eyes are looking. Also, people in the group can ask clarifying questions, like "What did you mean by X?" or "Can you be more specific?". Or the speaker can ask, "Did you understand what I said?" When people try to explain how to do a task without getting immediate feedback on how the receiver is understanding the communication, one can expect that natural language instructions will be missing critical information -- or may also specify unneeded extra information. Ever since I worked in the IBM Speech Research Group circa 2000, I have felt natural speech could be useful in programming -- but it will take a different perspective on how to use natural language as conversation and related creative experimentation to provide a different experience compared to what people are used to doing with conventional programming languages. It might be more akin to some aspects of pair programming perhaps. That said, a big feature of HyperTalk (used by HyperCard) was that is is closer to natural language than most programming languages. HyperTalk supported various alternate phrasings and also the use of the word "it". And the physical "card" metaphor provided an approachable metaphor for instructions about manipulating stacks. It is sad that Apple essentially killed off HyperCard for most users with various marketing decisions as it was an amazing platform that made programming approachable for many non-programmers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTalk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTalk And Inform7 as mentioned by someone else here is another example. Although Inform7 feels more about being read as natural language (when you write is within strict limits) than about being written flexibly as natural language.

k__ 6y ago
"Natural language is adapted for many tens of thousands of years to be used by groups of hunter/gatherers working together on a common task " Is this the case? I don't know much about languages, but I can't even recognise earlier version of my native language from a few centuries ago.
- pdfernhout 6y ago
  Thanks for the question (and indirectly an example of my main point on natural language as dialog). Sorry for not being clearer. I did not mean the words themselves. I mean the neural circuitry in humans for language. Also related: "Researcher Responds to Arguments Over His Theory of Arguing" https://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/researcher-responds-to-arguments-over-his-theory-of-arguing https://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/researcher-res... "The main idea of the “argumentative theory of reasoning,” put forward by Dan Sperber and myself is that the function of human reasoning — why it evolved — is to improve communication by allowing people to debate with each other: to produce and evaluate arguments during a discussion. This contrasts with the standard view of reasoning — apparently shared by quite a few of the readers — that reasoning evolved in order to further individual reasoning: to make better decisions, to plan ahead, to get better beliefs, etc. ... We do not claim that reasoning has nothing to do with the truth. We claim that reasoning did not evolve to allow the lone reasoner to find the truth. We think it evolved to argue. But arguing is not only about trying to convince other people; it’s also about listening to their arguments. So reasoning is two-sided. On the one hand, it is used to produce arguments. Here its goal is to convince people. Accordingly, it displays a strong confirmation bias — what people see as the “rhetoric” side of reasoning. On the other hand, reasoning is also used to evaluate arguments. Here its goal is to tease out good arguments from bad ones so as to accept warranted conclusions and, if things go well, get better beliefs and make better decisions in the end."
  - eternalban 6y ago
    > We claim that reasoning did not evolve to allow the lone reasoner to find the truth. We think it evolved to argue. Argue over what? One can easily argue (npi, and I will) that reasoning evolved in the individual to aid understanding, to comprehend. You first need to hold a point of view before you can argue that position and collectively reason about an object. You seem to give legs to your position by substituting "truth" for "understanding". A reminder that we humans collectively have "understood", "communicated", and wrote tomes on all sorts of falsehoolds. Reasoning has nothing to do with "truth" in principle.
  - pvg 6y ago
simonh 6y ago
The HyperCard language, or a relative of it, still lives on in the form of AppleScript but honestly it’s a pain to use. The verbosity gets annoying really fast. HyperCard seems ok to get something basic up and running quickly, but variations on it have existed for decades and never proved popular. I think Excel took over that role as the gateway to programming for many non programmers.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  The problem with AppleScript isn't the verbosity, it's the fact that the verbosity hides the API path model, which is actually quite brittle, obscure, and poorly documented - possibly because the features were added as an afterthought to the Accessibility framework, and there is no actual Automation API. You spend a lot of time selecting objects or processes, and the syntax can appear painfully arbitrary with a lot of "Need to know the magic word" code that you can't improvise from scratch - because you don't know the magic word. The fix would be to expose the API so users can click on any on-screen object, and AppleScript fills in the API path for the object. There's a utility that sort-of does this, but it's very well-hidden and not at all easy to use.
not_a_moth 6y ago
> Natural language is adapted for many tens of thousands of years to be used by groups of hunter/gatherers I'm curious why you say tens of thousand of years when the Homo genus has been around for over 2.5 million years?
hinkley 6y ago
Human language is full of imprecision that lets two parties disagree without coming to blows, or one party to achieve a coup over the other. There are a number of reasons legal documents bear only a loose resemblance to spoken language, but an important one is because they are closer to programming than they are to literature. They're trying to nail down all of the boundary conditions so that asymmetric information doesn't result in excessive harm to either party in the agreement. So one party can't use a Trojan or a 0-day exploit against the other. And every time they discover they've screwed it up, the language becomes a little more stilted.
juliendorra 6y ago
About why language gave us an evolutionary advantage, there’s another hypothesis than the informational/hunting one (and it has much more explaining and predicting power in my opinion), the Dunbar’s one: Dunbar's suggestion],"then, is that language evolved as a 'cheap form of social grooming, so enabling the ancestral humans to maintain the cohesion of the unusually large groups demanded by the particular conditions they faced at the time." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/004724849290081J?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/004724... "In other words, did language evolve tofacilitate the exchange of technological infor-mation (with gossip as an idle by-product), ordid it evolve to facilitate the exchange of socialinformation (with the exchange of technologicalinformation as a useful by-product)?" https://attach.matita.net/ziorufus/Dunbar%20gossip.pdf https://attach.matita.net/ziorufus/Dunbar%20gossip.pdf

k__ 6y ago

"Natural language is adapted for many tens of thousands of years to be used by groups of hunter/gatherers working together on a common task " Is this the case? I don't know much about languages, but I can't even recognise earlier version of my native language from a few centuries ago.

pdfernhout 6y ago
Thanks for the question (and indirectly an example of my main point on natural language as dialog). Sorry for not being clearer. I did not mean the words themselves. I mean the neural circuitry in humans for language. Also related: "Researcher Responds to Arguments Over His Theory of Arguing" https://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/researcher-responds-to-arguments-over-his-theory-of-arguing https://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/researcher-res... "The main idea of the “argumentative theory of reasoning,” put forward by Dan Sperber and myself is that the function of human reasoning — why it evolved — is to improve communication by allowing people to debate with each other: to produce and evaluate arguments during a discussion. This contrasts with the standard view of reasoning — apparently shared by quite a few of the readers — that reasoning evolved in order to further individual reasoning: to make better decisions, to plan ahead, to get better beliefs, etc. ... We do not claim that reasoning has nothing to do with the truth. We claim that reasoning did not evolve to allow the lone reasoner to find the truth. We think it evolved to argue. But arguing is not only about trying to convince other people; it’s also about listening to their arguments. So reasoning is two-sided. On the one hand, it is used to produce arguments. Here its goal is to convince people. Accordingly, it displays a strong confirmation bias — what people see as the “rhetoric” side of reasoning. On the other hand, reasoning is also used to evaluate arguments. Here its goal is to tease out good arguments from bad ones so as to accept warranted conclusions and, if things go well, get better beliefs and make better decisions in the end."
- eternalban 6y ago
  > We claim that reasoning did not evolve to allow the lone reasoner to find the truth. We think it evolved to argue. Argue over what? One can easily argue (npi, and I will) that reasoning evolved in the individual to aid understanding, to comprehend. You first need to hold a point of view before you can argue that position and collectively reason about an object. You seem to give legs to your position by substituting "truth" for "understanding". A reminder that we humans collectively have "understood", "communicated", and wrote tomes on all sorts of falsehoolds. Reasoning has nothing to do with "truth" in principle.
- pvg 6y ago

simonh 6y ago

The HyperCard language, or a relative of it, still lives on in the form of AppleScript but honestly it’s a pain to use. The verbosity gets annoying really fast. HyperCard seems ok to get something basic up and running quickly, but variations on it have existed for decades and never proved popular. I think Excel took over that role as the gateway to programming for many non programmers.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
The problem with AppleScript isn't the verbosity, it's the fact that the verbosity hides the API path model, which is actually quite brittle, obscure, and poorly documented - possibly because the features were added as an afterthought to the Accessibility framework, and there is no actual Automation API. You spend a lot of time selecting objects or processes, and the syntax can appear painfully arbitrary with a lot of "Need to know the magic word" code that you can't improvise from scratch - because you don't know the magic word. The fix would be to expose the API so users can click on any on-screen object, and AppleScript fills in the API path for the object. There's a utility that sort-of does this, but it's very well-hidden and not at all easy to use.

not_a_moth 6y ago

> Natural language is adapted for many tens of thousands of years to be used by groups of hunter/gatherers I'm curious why you say tens of thousand of years when the Homo genus has been around for over 2.5 million years?

hinkley 6y ago

Human language is full of imprecision that lets two parties disagree without coming to blows, or one party to achieve a coup over the other. There are a number of reasons legal documents bear only a loose resemblance to spoken language, but an important one is because they are closer to programming than they are to literature. They're trying to nail down all of the boundary conditions so that asymmetric information doesn't result in excessive harm to either party in the agreement. So one party can't use a Trojan or a 0-day exploit against the other. And every time they discover they've screwed it up, the language becomes a little more stilted.

juliendorra 6y ago

About why language gave us an evolutionary advantage, there’s another hypothesis than the informational/hunting one (and it has much more explaining and predicting power in my opinion), the Dunbar’s one: Dunbar's suggestion],"then, is that language evolved as a 'cheap form of social grooming, so enabling the ancestral humans to maintain the cohesion of the unusually large groups demanded by the particular conditions they faced at the time." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/004724849290081J?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/004724... "In other words, did language evolve tofacilitate the exchange of technological infor-mation (with gossip as an idle by-product), ordid it evolve to facilitate the exchange of socialinformation (with the exchange of technologicalinformation as a useful by-product)?" https://attach.matita.net/ziorufus/Dunbar%20gossip.pdf https://attach.matita.net/ziorufus/Dunbar%20gossip.pdf