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I feel like I've heard "In 10 years, I expect programming languages will be mostly obsolete, since computers will be able to translate natural language into mac

I feel like I've heard "In 10 years, I expect programming languages will be mostly obsolete, since computers will be able to translate natural language into machine instructions with 100% effectiveness." every decade for the last four decades. I feel like the problem with such predictions is that imprecision is a featured of natural languages that is incompatible not only with precision required by our current computing hardware and programming languages but incompatible with the precision required for understanding. If you could translate natural language into machine language with 100% effectiveness, you could get rid of lawyers, judges, juries, and courts, not just programmers. I don't see that happening.

ryanklee 4y ago
It's a ridiculous assertion. There is no correct, deterministic path from natural language expressions to directed machine behavior, as there is no correct, deterministic natural language expression in the first place. It's not static, it has varying levels of precision, meaning is context and listener dependent, natural grammars are descriptive not prescriptive, speaker perspectives are regional, historical, fluid, metacognitive, and full of ambiguity as feature, and always in need of hermeneutic methods to adjust and adjudicate interpretations. There is almost nothing about natural language use that ought to lead anyone to believe we are going to get computers to understand our requirements any better than we do, which often, is very poorly even when we try very hard.