8 ms·

The English-Likeness Monster Stalks a New Generation of Programmers

70 points by joshuacc 14y ago

curtis 14y ago
I had the misfortune of writing some AppleScript just the other day, and I have to say this post is spot-on.
einhverfr 14y ago
I actually disagree to some extent with Raganwald here. I am both a software engineer and an amateur linguist. Let me try to go into where my disagreement is. I figure that someone, probably me, will have to set the record straight about how poorly our expectations of English grammar match the realities and utilities of this language.[1] Natural languages and computer languages are very different both in how they are used and in the constraints that exist on them. It is very obvious that you can't write programs in written English for that reason, and the only reason why we have this confusion is not what we expect from programming languages but what we expect from natural languages. As every introductory linguistics textbook will remind you, natural languages are defined by usage patterns. Computer languages however are defined by parser behavior. They must be rigorously specified, while such specification kills natural languages. Many people, particularly public school English teachers, would like to see English specified to this level of clean, precise, prescriptive rules, but this doesn't really work in practice. Different dialects occur and these dialects often have very different features (note the habitual tenses in African American Vernacular English, for example, which also occurs in some dialects from England). Usage defines the language, just like it can define good/bad coding practices in one school of thought or another, but usage does not define C. If I decide there is a clearer way to handle pointers, what I come up with isn't C any more. However habitual tenses ("I be workin' Tuesdays") as much as they may be seen as "bad English" by some prescriptivists, are just natural, organic developments within the language. There are also dialects of English that are less imprecise. For example consider legalese which is often considered to be a hyper-defined dialect of English (also a very formulaic one). The advantage is that legalese can fall back to other English terms for additional meaning and one can be reasonably sure what a contract means even if you are not a lawyer. So what does this mean about English-Likeness? Certainly we wouldn't expect the laws of the nation and contracts to be written in a purely symbolic language even though these need a level of definition well beyond what ordinary everyday English can provide. In fact if we did so, this would interfere with the function of legal instruments. Legalese may be a hyper-defined dialect but at the end of the day, it is still just as much English as African American Vernacular English is. English likeness is more a blessing than a curse in the field of law, even though it is quite clearly both. Because English-Likeness is both a blessing and a curse there, it is worth asking the same here. Can an ordinary individual read a program written in Perl or Python and understand it? No, but that same ordinary individual probably cannot read the Supreme Court's opinion in Pedilla v. Hanft, or Hamdi v. Rumsfeld either and really understand what the court is arguing about. But what English-likeness does is it speeds up learning. There is a difference between how quickly you can pick up Spanish as an English speaker and how quickly you can pick up Bahasa Indonesia or Algonquin. Spanish in both structure and vocabulary is much closer to English than either one is to Indonesian or Algonquin, so I think the same applies, and languages which follow very different structures (lisp reminds me of Irish Gaelic due to the latter's VSO word order) tend not to gain much traction. Additionally English is probably the best language in the world to be like for a programming language. We have a relatively simple lexical structure and a fairly inflexible word order and much of this is due to the fact that Middle English arose as a sort of creole (with all the grammatical simplification that goes with that) between Anglo-Saxon and Old Norman French. Other creoles might be good choices too, but this is a good choice and we might as well stick with it. [1] Note, we would never say "Me will have to" and yet within the parenthetical, the normal rules of pronoun cases get shifted a bit. See Bailey, Charles, "How English Grammars have Miscued" in Polome, Edgar (ed) "Language Change and Typological Variation," JIES monograph 30.
- Cyranix 14y ago
  Another amateur linguist + software dev here (loosely involved in NLP-related work and studied linguistics at university). I invite you to try to convince me that there might possibly be a natural-language-esque version of the (in)famous inverse square root function that is more comprehensible than the original. float Q_rsqrt( float number ) { long i; float x2, y; const float threehalfs = 1.5F; x2 = number * 0.5F; y = number; i = * ( long * ) &y; i = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 ); y = * ( float * ) &i; y = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) ); return y; } You have written many words and have buried your counterpoint in the process. Put aside the superficial points (e.g. reasons to choose a dialect of English over a dialect of another language) and address the main issue: if programming is the act of translating human concepts into precisely defined math and logic, how can we reasonably rely on such a fundamentally imprecise tool as natural language to get the job done? I contend that there is no sufficiently high level of abstraction where natural language would be more suitable.
  - einhverfr 14y ago
    My point is that one doesn't use a natural language to get the job done, one uses a computer language in the likeness of a natural language to get the job done. The similarity speeds learning process. As for an example, you just gave one. But if we wanted to make it more natural-language-like it would be a slightly different syntax: DECLARE FUNCTION q_rsqrt (float number) THAT RETURNS float AS ( .... ); Now if you think of the natural language phenomenon of ellipsis, this gets shortened essentially to function sqrt(float number) returns float ( and we might want to change this to make it more concise float function sqrt(float number) { }
    - pdonis 14y ago
      DECLARE FUNCTION q_rsqrt (float number) THAT RETURNS float AS ( .... ); And no programmer will want to write in such a language because it's so verbose. I don't mind making programming languages look more like natural languages; I would offer Python as an example of a language that takes advantage of this where it makes sense. But I draw the line at having to type boilerplate; if it's absolutely necessary, at least keep it to an absolute minimum.
andrewcooke 14y ago
the point about dsls for business logic is a good one. it always sounds so good in theory... i'd love to hear success stories about this. what makes a dsl intended for domain experts work? i suspect it's got little to do with the dsl and a lot to do with politics and motivation of the parties involved. and unicorn blood, of course. [edit: limiting functionality (related to raganwald's reply below) reminded me of this exchange - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5111265 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5111265 - which was perhaps a wiser approach than i thought at the time. lbrandy says: "as simple as possible for analysts to use". and that seems to have been a success story.]
- raganwald 14y ago
  Related: http://unspace.ca/blog/duck-programming/ http://unspace.ca/blog/duck-programming/
_glass 14y ago
The point is to some extend right, that you need in a general purpose language an easy way to reason about the consequence. But DSLs are very useful in their analogy towards another system, i.e. Mathematica is very successful in that way. Another example is Siri. If the end result is not of most importance and an educated guess is acceptable when Siri for scripts could be a way to easily program the device.
groby_b 14y ago
I'm not sure DSLs qualify as "the English-Likeness monster". A good DSL isn't about being like english, it's about being concise and expressive in the given domain. A good DSL has no need to "look like English".
- steveklabnik 14y ago
  People often think of DSLs as a way of making a concise, expressive view of the domain look like English. See, for example, RSpec. (I guess what I'm really saying is that you're right, but you're saying something else, raganwald is right too.)
  - Camillo 14y ago
    I'm having a variant of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon where I start seeing something everywhere after writing about it (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5056667 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5056667).
    - iambot 14y ago
      I personally like how cucumber tests look exactly like english but it's up to the test writer to explain (through the writing of "step definitions") what each type of phase means (in actual ruby) and then when you combine them you can perform any number of _domain-specific_ tasks. Kinda neat. and a halfway between actually writing a DSL and explaining to the ruby runtime how to interpret a subset of english for this domain.
    - vitno 14y ago
      thank you! I knew there had to be a name for this...
  - chawco 14y ago
    I don't think raganwald is right here, or rather he's only right about a subset of DSLs -- the subset of DSLs which attempt to map a specific domain to english. I think most good DSLs eschew mapping domains to english in favour of mapping those domains to some new language designed to express information about that domain.
saraid216 14y ago
It makes me think of MUDs, specifically my once-upon-a-time favorite, Dragonrealms. It had the usual "command direct-object" syntactical format common to MUDs, but it became an infamous problem to wrestle with the parser to find the correct "obvious" action. > put amulet on drawer > put amulet in drawer > put amulet behind drawer > place amulet on drawer > give amulet to drawer > push amulet to drawer > show amulet to drawer
- throwaway54-762 14y ago
  +1 for MUDs, MOOs, etc. I played Ancient Anguish in the late 90s / early 2000s. Similar story, although often figuring out (guessing) the correct verb was used as part of quests...
- deleted 14y ago
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- throwaway2048 14y ago
  Seems Wolfram Alpha suffers the same problem that you and the article detail.
Zikes 14y ago
I think PowerShell suffers from this issue, except it was defined by people that speak English as a second language.
- gecko 14y ago
  You're going to have to explain what on Earth you mean. PowerShell just reads (and writes) like someone forced Perl and .NET to have a child. AppleScript, Inform 7, Smalltalk-72, and other "English" languages dream of being in the same boat as PowerShell in terms of consistency, readability, or power.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - pacaro 14y ago
    I believe that Zikes is merely making a racist comment about the make-up of teams at Microsoft.
ilaksh 14y ago
There is nothing wrong with code that looks like english. The problem is that you can take that too far, or just sometimes not learn the actual syntax and try to use English instead. That isnt a problem for many languages. I really havent seen a lot of code where an attempt to make it read more like english was.making it less readable or causing other problems. Also, there is a system for logical rules called Attempto Controlled English which I think has some proven use cases for business rules.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Applescript has junk like extra meaningless words added to programs just to make them resemble English. And things that are easy to express usually, like a function with four arguments, become a mess because of a fear of punctuation.
richardjordan 14y ago
I think Wittgenstein demonstrated how much can be said in a language that doesn't have direct meaning when it comes to a logical framework. I think it's also underestimated the computing horsepower our brain uses to merely handle the ambiguity inherent to language. Given that to execute a program language needs to fit into some kind of logical, causal, framework, and that computers don't deal well with ambiguity, it's not surprising that this is a problem.
charonn0 14y ago
Programming languages all posses one thing that most (perhaps all) natural languages lack: a 1:1 equivalence with some mathematical construct, or an abstraction backed-up by such a construct. In order for a natural language to be useful for programming computers the language must be completely describable in mathematical terms.
- dhimes 14y ago
  Dare I say, NewSpeak?
- Cyranix 14y ago
  Completely agree; left a similar comment upthread. Natural language will be insufficient for programming until we succeed in accurately reducing all natural language to mathematical expressions, which could be achievable if we unlock the secrets of exactly how the human brain stores and accesses data. Needless to say, I'm not holding my breath.
eduardordm 14y ago
This is a talk by Guy Steele and Richard Gabriel you might like it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nii1n8PYLrc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nii1n8PYLrc It was beautiful.
- aidos 14y ago
  Thanks for posting that - will watch it through when I have time. I skimmed it and hit on Perligata - amazing http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.... maximum inquementum tum biguttam egresso scribe.
anigbrowl 14y ago
There's no point in asking computers to interpret the ambiguity of English commands, but there is room for improving tools that attempt to elucidate meaning from English statements and are capable for formulating questions. The fact is that English is perfectly serviceable for people to communicate complex concepts to each other through either conversation or context. (s/English/your native language)
deleted 14y ago
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alxndr 14y ago
> "It's far simpler to learn a precise, unambiguous language and manipulate the parser directly." Since no one else has mentioned it yet, Lojban [1] seems like the perfect candidate for this. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban
- gamegoblin 14y ago
  But since nobody speaks Lojban natively (and probably never will (I am aware there exist a few people who speak Esperanto natively)), you might as well learn a programming language. Both Lojban and Python will be second languages to someone, and Python (or any other programming language) is probably easier to reason about for the types of things we use programming languages for.
  - alxndr 14y ago
    There are no native speakers yet... https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/lojban/H4n9iSAm0-I https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/lojban/H...
- neumann_alfred 14y ago
  Oh wow, I think I'm falling in love with a language. http://www.ainewsletter.com/newsletters/aix_0503.htm#loglan http://www.ainewsletter.com/newsletters/aix_0503.htm#loglan http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/Play/lojban.html http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/Play/lojban.html
johnwatson11218 14y ago
Mathematicians have been developing more abstract and concise symbols for hundreds of years and it looks nothing like English or any other natural language. If I had to guess I would say that future programming languages will look more like mathematics than anything else.
- klibertp 14y ago
  Why wait for the future, you can program in APL or (I recommend this one) J today! Have a look at quicksort in J: quicksort=: (($:@(<#[), (=#[), $:@(>#[)) ({~ ?@#)) ^: (1<#) Cute, isn't it? I was playing with J for some time - a few weekends maybe - I managed to get to the level of conscious incompetency, which is a lot for such a foreign language and then stopped, I just had enough. J is certainly very powerful, consistent and logical language and I believe that after some years I would be able to read and comprehend J's code almost as fast as any other language from the get go. I'm just not convinced it's worth it. Put another way: I certainly hope that future programming languages will not look more like J. And you can, of course, grab a J system and use it today if you want.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    You just don't like using English punctuation as function names.
  - vorg 14y ago
    What about APL? The quicksort example from http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Sorting_algorithms/Quicksort http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Sorting_algorithms/Quicksort reads: qsort ← {1≥⍴⍵:⍵⋄ e← ⍵[?⍴⍵]⋄ (∇(⍵<e)/⍵), ((⍵=e)/⍵), ∇(⍵>e)/⍵} Unlike J, all the brackets/parens/etc are balanced, and the functions and operators have single-character names. Having played with both APL and J, I find APL to be easier to read. J was really just an experiment, adding rank matching and forks and hooks to APL, as well as using ASCII only for syntax. It doesn't take long to remember the keys for entering the non-ASCII characters into APL, and it looks more readable than J. I think a future programming language should have precedences for its operators, though.
prentis 14y ago
The case of bad English-likeness that has wreaked the most damage is SQL. Not only does it turn the elegant relational model into a retarded COBOL, it continues to inspire abominations like HQL and LINQ.
MBlume 14y ago
Of all the languages I've used, Python comes closest to English-like while still being a language I can enjoy programming in. I seriously doubt it's possible (absent strong AI) to get much further. Also, Guido's probably a once-per-generation genius, so he can get away with more than we can.
dougk16 14y ago
I'm totally in agreement as far as the current state of NLP and AI goes, but all bets may be off as these fields mature. For example, I have a client that gives me a very detailed specification for a simple iPhone app in a few English paragraphs, along with storyboards, wireframes, and similar apps. I bang out an alpha in a week or two that's mostly faithful to her conception. She writes up some minor changes she'd like, I implement them, get back to her, and on we go until the app is close enough to what she had in mind. In this case, I'm essentially a really slow compiler turning English language into machine language. Who can say to what extent machines will be able to perform this function in the future?
- Cyranix 14y ago
  I think you're dramatically underestimating the amount of work your brain did in that process.
  - dougk16 14y ago
    I'm obviously oversimplifying, and an AI-driven English->asm compiler comparable to my godlike programming abilities is at the far, far end of the technology gradient from now to Lieutenant Data, but it doesn't seem far fetched to have such compilers be "good enough" for designers to create certain MVPs and such without programmer intervention, in the next decade or so.
jgfoot 14y ago
OK, maybe writing arbitrary English as a program won't work; but, I can think of a lot of occasions where it would be useful for a computer program to be understandable by any English speaker. I'm thinking of lawyers, who want to be able to review whether a program conforms with legal requirements, or managers, who want to be able to confirm that business logic is doing what they want it to do. Zed Shaw kind of hints at this in his classic "ACLs are Dead" talk, where he talks about using metaprogramming to make Ruby syntax more readable for lawyers.
- dinkumthinkum 14y ago
  No, to be honest they should just learn to program then. Maybe what you're talking about would be great if all programs were 100 line simple things but that's not reality. If we want to solve the "lawyers need to read and understand computer programs for legal reasons" problem, it makes more sense to just educate lawyers on programming. In some ways this is like saying lawyers need to be electrical engineers, civil engineers, etc. We need physics to more Englishy and less Mathy. :) I jest but I'm serious. For business rules, perhaps this simple case could be expressed with a specialized DSL or config depending on your needs but I think this is a little tertiary.
hobb0001 14y ago
Reminds me of the "death of programmers" that I've been hearing is right around the corner for that last 3 decades. You know, computers will understand what you want and just do it. Except that 90% of programming is not translating ideas into computer cyphers, it's figuring out (or guessing at) what the user really wants. For example, what should happen if the network drops out in the middle of a save? Should it save a copy locally? Where? No, not the temp directory; that will be erased if the computer is rebooted. And so on.

70 points by joshuacc 14y ago

I had the misfortune of writing some AppleScript just the other day, and I have to say this post is spot-on.

I actually disagree to some extent with Raganwald here. I am both a software engineer and an amateur linguist. Let me try to go into where my disagreement is. I figure that someone, probably me, will have to set the record straight about how poorly our expectations of English grammar match the realities and utilities of this language.[1] Natural languages and computer languages are very different both in how they are used and in the constraints that exist on them. It is very obvious that you can't write programs in written English for that reason, and the only reason why we have this confusion is not what we expect from programming languages but what we expect from natural languages. As every introductory linguistics textbook will remind you, natural languages are defined by usage patterns. Computer languages however are defined by parser behavior. They must be rigorously specified, while such specification kills natural languages. Many people, particularly public school English teachers, would like to see English specified to this level of clean, precise, prescriptive rules, but this doesn't really work in practice. Different dialects occur and these dialects often have very different features (note the habitual tenses in African American Vernacular English, for example, which also occurs in some dialects from England). Usage defines the language, just like it can define good/bad coding practices in one school of thought or another, but usage does not define C. If I decide there is a clearer way to handle pointers, what I come up with isn't C any more. However habitual tenses ("I be workin' Tuesdays") as much as they may be seen as "bad English" by some prescriptivists, are just natural, organic developments within the language. There are also dialects of English that are less imprecise. For example consider legalese which is often considered to be a hyper-defined dialect of English (also a very formulaic one). The advantage is that legalese can fall back to other English terms for additional meaning and one can be reasonably sure what a contract means even if you are not a lawyer. So what does this mean about English-Likeness? Certainly we wouldn't expect the laws of the nation and contracts to be written in a purely symbolic language even though these need a level of definition well beyond what ordinary everyday English can provide. In fact if we did so, this would interfere with the function of legal instruments. Legalese may be a hyper-defined dialect but at the end of the day, it is still just as much English as African American Vernacular English is. English likeness is more a blessing than a curse in the field of law, even though it is quite clearly both. Because English-Likeness is both a blessing and a curse there, it is worth asking the same here. Can an ordinary individual read a program written in Perl or Python and understand it? No, but that same ordinary individual probably cannot read the Supreme Court's opinion in Pedilla v. Hanft, or Hamdi v. Rumsfeld either and really understand what the court is arguing about. But what English-likeness does is it speeds up learning. There is a difference between how quickly you can pick up Spanish as an English speaker and how quickly you can pick up Bahasa Indonesia or Algonquin. Spanish in both structure and vocabulary is much closer to English than either one is to Indonesian or Algonquin, so I think the same applies, and languages which follow very different structures (lisp reminds me of Irish Gaelic due to the latter's VSO word order) tend not to gain much traction. Additionally English is probably the best language in the world to be like for a programming language. We have a relatively simple lexical structure and a fairly inflexible word order and much of this is due to the fact that Middle English arose as a sort of creole (with all the grammatical simplification that goes with that) between Anglo-Saxon and Old Norman French. Other creoles might be good choices too, but this is a good choice and we might as well stick with it. [1] Note, we would never say "Me will have to" and yet within the parenthetical, the normal rules of pronoun cases get shifted a bit. See Bailey, Charles, "How English Grammars have Miscued" in Polome, Edgar (ed) "Language Change and Typological Variation," JIES monograph 30.

Cyranix 14y ago
Another amateur linguist + software dev here (loosely involved in NLP-related work and studied linguistics at university). I invite you to try to convince me that there might possibly be a natural-language-esque version of the (in)famous inverse square root function that is more comprehensible than the original. float Q_rsqrt( float number ) { long i; float x2, y; const float threehalfs = 1.5F; x2 = number * 0.5F; y = number; i = * ( long * ) &y; i = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 ); y = * ( float * ) &i; y = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) ); return y; } You have written many words and have buried your counterpoint in the process. Put aside the superficial points (e.g. reasons to choose a dialect of English over a dialect of another language) and address the main issue: if programming is the act of translating human concepts into precisely defined math and logic, how can we reasonably rely on such a fundamentally imprecise tool as natural language to get the job done? I contend that there is no sufficiently high level of abstraction where natural language would be more suitable.
- einhverfr 14y ago
  My point is that one doesn't use a natural language to get the job done, one uses a computer language in the likeness of a natural language to get the job done. The similarity speeds learning process. As for an example, you just gave one. But if we wanted to make it more natural-language-like it would be a slightly different syntax: DECLARE FUNCTION q_rsqrt (float number) THAT RETURNS float AS ( .... ); Now if you think of the natural language phenomenon of ellipsis, this gets shortened essentially to function sqrt(float number) returns float ( and we might want to change this to make it more concise float function sqrt(float number) { }
  - pdonis 14y ago
    DECLARE FUNCTION q_rsqrt (float number) THAT RETURNS float AS ( .... ); And no programmer will want to write in such a language because it's so verbose. I don't mind making programming languages look more like natural languages; I would offer Python as an example of a language that takes advantage of this where it makes sense. But I draw the line at having to type boilerplate; if it's absolutely necessary, at least keep it to an absolute minimum.

andrewcooke 14y ago

the point about dsls for business logic is a good one. it always sounds so good in theory... i'd love to hear success stories about this. what makes a dsl intended for domain experts work? i suspect it's got little to do with the dsl and a lot to do with politics and motivation of the parties involved. and unicorn blood, of course. [edit: limiting functionality (related to raganwald's reply below) reminded me of this exchange - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5111265 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5111265 - which was perhaps a wiser approach than i thought at the time. lbrandy says: "as simple as possible for analysts to use". and that seems to have been a success story.]

raganwald 14y ago
Related: http://unspace.ca/blog/duck-programming/ http://unspace.ca/blog/duck-programming/

_glass 14y ago

The point is to some extend right, that you need in a general purpose language an easy way to reason about the consequence. But DSLs are very useful in their analogy towards another system, i.e. Mathematica is very successful in that way. Another example is Siri. If the end result is not of most importance and an educated guess is acceptable when Siri for scripts could be a way to easily program the device.

groby_b 14y ago

I'm not sure DSLs qualify as "the English-Likeness monster". A good DSL isn't about being like english, it's about being concise and expressive in the given domain. A good DSL has no need to "look like English".

steveklabnik 14y ago
People often think of DSLs as a way of making a concise, expressive view of the domain look like English. See, for example, RSpec. (I guess what I'm really saying is that you're right, but you're saying something else, raganwald is right too.)
- Camillo 14y ago
  I'm having a variant of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon where I start seeing something everywhere after writing about it (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5056667 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5056667).
  - iambot 14y ago
    I personally like how cucumber tests look exactly like english but it's up to the test writer to explain (through the writing of "step definitions") what each type of phase means (in actual ruby) and then when you combine them you can perform any number of _domain-specific_ tasks. Kinda neat. and a halfway between actually writing a DSL and explaining to the ruby runtime how to interpret a subset of english for this domain.
  - vitno 14y ago
    thank you! I knew there had to be a name for this...
- chawco 14y ago
  I don't think raganwald is right here, or rather he's only right about a subset of DSLs -- the subset of DSLs which attempt to map a specific domain to english. I think most good DSLs eschew mapping domains to english in favour of mapping those domains to some new language designed to express information about that domain.

saraid216 14y ago

It makes me think of MUDs, specifically my once-upon-a-time favorite, Dragonrealms. It had the usual "command direct-object" syntactical format common to MUDs, but it became an infamous problem to wrestle with the parser to find the correct "obvious" action. > put amulet on drawer > put amulet in drawer > put amulet behind drawer > place amulet on drawer > give amulet to drawer > push amulet to drawer > show amulet to drawer

throwaway54-762 14y ago
+1 for MUDs, MOOs, etc. I played Ancient Anguish in the late 90s / early 2000s. Similar story, although often figuring out (guessing) the correct verb was used as part of quests...
deleted 14y ago
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throwaway2048 14y ago
Seems Wolfram Alpha suffers the same problem that you and the article detail.

Zikes 14y ago

I think PowerShell suffers from this issue, except it was defined by people that speak English as a second language.

gecko 14y ago
You're going to have to explain what on Earth you mean. PowerShell just reads (and writes) like someone forced Perl and .NET to have a child. AppleScript, Inform 7, Smalltalk-72, and other "English" languages dream of being in the same boat as PowerShell in terms of consistency, readability, or power.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- pacaro 14y ago
  I believe that Zikes is merely making a racist comment about the make-up of teams at Microsoft.

ilaksh 14y ago

There is nothing wrong with code that looks like english. The problem is that you can take that too far, or just sometimes not learn the actual syntax and try to use English instead. That isnt a problem for many languages. I really havent seen a lot of code where an attempt to make it read more like english was.making it less readable or causing other problems. Also, there is a system for logical rules called Attempto Controlled English which I think has some proven use cases for business rules.

Evbn 14y ago
Applescript has junk like extra meaningless words added to programs just to make them resemble English. And things that are easy to express usually, like a function with four arguments, become a mess because of a fear of punctuation.

richardjordan 14y ago

I think Wittgenstein demonstrated how much can be said in a language that doesn't have direct meaning when it comes to a logical framework. I think it's also underestimated the computing horsepower our brain uses to merely handle the ambiguity inherent to language. Given that to execute a program language needs to fit into some kind of logical, causal, framework, and that computers don't deal well with ambiguity, it's not surprising that this is a problem.

charonn0 14y ago

Programming languages all posses one thing that most (perhaps all) natural languages lack: a 1:1 equivalence with some mathematical construct, or an abstraction backed-up by such a construct. In order for a natural language to be useful for programming computers the language must be completely describable in mathematical terms.

dhimes 14y ago
Dare I say, NewSpeak?
Cyranix 14y ago
Completely agree; left a similar comment upthread. Natural language will be insufficient for programming until we succeed in accurately reducing all natural language to mathematical expressions, which could be achievable if we unlock the secrets of exactly how the human brain stores and accesses data. Needless to say, I'm not holding my breath.

eduardordm 14y ago

This is a talk by Guy Steele and Richard Gabriel you might like it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nii1n8PYLrc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nii1n8PYLrc It was beautiful.

aidos 14y ago
Thanks for posting that - will watch it through when I have time. I skimmed it and hit on Perligata - amazing http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.... maximum inquementum tum biguttam egresso scribe.

anigbrowl 14y ago

There's no point in asking computers to interpret the ambiguity of English commands, but there is room for improving tools that attempt to elucidate meaning from English statements and are capable for formulating questions. The fact is that English is perfectly serviceable for people to communicate complex concepts to each other through either conversation or context. (s/English/your native language)

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

alxndr 14y ago

> "It's far simpler to learn a precise, unambiguous language and manipulate the parser directly." Since no one else has mentioned it yet, Lojban [1] seems like the perfect candidate for this. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban

gamegoblin 14y ago
But since nobody speaks Lojban natively (and probably never will (I am aware there exist a few people who speak Esperanto natively)), you might as well learn a programming language. Both Lojban and Python will be second languages to someone, and Python (or any other programming language) is probably easier to reason about for the types of things we use programming languages for.
- alxndr 14y ago
  There are no native speakers yet... https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/lojban/H4n9iSAm0-I https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/lojban/H...
neumann_alfred 14y ago
Oh wow, I think I'm falling in love with a language. http://www.ainewsletter.com/newsletters/aix_0503.htm#loglan http://www.ainewsletter.com/newsletters/aix_0503.htm#loglan http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/Play/lojban.html http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/Play/lojban.html

johnwatson11218 14y ago

Mathematicians have been developing more abstract and concise symbols for hundreds of years and it looks nothing like English or any other natural language. If I had to guess I would say that future programming languages will look more like mathematics than anything else.

klibertp 14y ago
Why wait for the future, you can program in APL or (I recommend this one) J today! Have a look at quicksort in J: quicksort=: (($:@(<#[), (=#[), $:@(>#[)) ({~ ?@#)) ^: (1<#) Cute, isn't it? I was playing with J for some time - a few weekends maybe - I managed to get to the level of conscious incompetency, which is a lot for such a foreign language and then stopped, I just had enough. J is certainly very powerful, consistent and logical language and I believe that after some years I would be able to read and comprehend J's code almost as fast as any other language from the get go. I'm just not convinced it's worth it. Put another way: I certainly hope that future programming languages will not look more like J. And you can, of course, grab a J system and use it today if you want.
- Evbn 14y ago
  You just don't like using English punctuation as function names.
- vorg 14y ago
  What about APL? The quicksort example from http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Sorting_algorithms/Quicksort http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Sorting_algorithms/Quicksort reads: qsort ← {1≥⍴⍵:⍵⋄ e← ⍵[?⍴⍵]⋄ (∇(⍵<e)/⍵), ((⍵=e)/⍵), ∇(⍵>e)/⍵} Unlike J, all the brackets/parens/etc are balanced, and the functions and operators have single-character names. Having played with both APL and J, I find APL to be easier to read. J was really just an experiment, adding rank matching and forks and hooks to APL, as well as using ASCII only for syntax. It doesn't take long to remember the keys for entering the non-ASCII characters into APL, and it looks more readable than J. I think a future programming language should have precedences for its operators, though.

prentis 14y ago

The case of bad English-likeness that has wreaked the most damage is SQL. Not only does it turn the elegant relational model into a retarded COBOL, it continues to inspire abominations like HQL and LINQ.

MBlume 14y ago

Of all the languages I've used, Python comes closest to English-like while still being a language I can enjoy programming in. I seriously doubt it's possible (absent strong AI) to get much further. Also, Guido's probably a once-per-generation genius, so he can get away with more than we can.

dougk16 14y ago

I'm totally in agreement as far as the current state of NLP and AI goes, but all bets may be off as these fields mature. For example, I have a client that gives me a very detailed specification for a simple iPhone app in a few English paragraphs, along with storyboards, wireframes, and similar apps. I bang out an alpha in a week or two that's mostly faithful to her conception. She writes up some minor changes she'd like, I implement them, get back to her, and on we go until the app is close enough to what she had in mind. In this case, I'm essentially a really slow compiler turning English language into machine language. Who can say to what extent machines will be able to perform this function in the future?

Cyranix 14y ago
I think you're dramatically underestimating the amount of work your brain did in that process.
- dougk16 14y ago
  I'm obviously oversimplifying, and an AI-driven English->asm compiler comparable to my godlike programming abilities is at the far, far end of the technology gradient from now to Lieutenant Data, but it doesn't seem far fetched to have such compilers be "good enough" for designers to create certain MVPs and such without programmer intervention, in the next decade or so.

jgfoot 14y ago

OK, maybe writing arbitrary English as a program won't work; but, I can think of a lot of occasions where it would be useful for a computer program to be understandable by any English speaker. I'm thinking of lawyers, who want to be able to review whether a program conforms with legal requirements, or managers, who want to be able to confirm that business logic is doing what they want it to do. Zed Shaw kind of hints at this in his classic "ACLs are Dead" talk, where he talks about using metaprogramming to make Ruby syntax more readable for lawyers.

dinkumthinkum 14y ago
No, to be honest they should just learn to program then. Maybe what you're talking about would be great if all programs were 100 line simple things but that's not reality. If we want to solve the "lawyers need to read and understand computer programs for legal reasons" problem, it makes more sense to just educate lawyers on programming. In some ways this is like saying lawyers need to be electrical engineers, civil engineers, etc. We need physics to more Englishy and less Mathy. :) I jest but I'm serious. For business rules, perhaps this simple case could be expressed with a specialized DSL or config depending on your needs but I think this is a little tertiary.

hobb0001 14y ago

Reminds me of the "death of programmers" that I've been hearing is right around the corner for that last 3 decades. You know, computers will understand what you want and just do it. Except that 90% of programming is not translating ideas into computer cyphers, it's figuring out (or guessing at) what the user really wants. For example, what should happen if the network drops out in the middle of a save? Should it save a copy locally? Where? No, not the temp directory; that will be erased if the computer is rebooted. And so on.