4 ms·

It could if there were some level of AI behind it.

• einhverfr 14y ago
  But at that point you run into another problem, namely that you can interact with computers in natural language but I don't think you can program them, because once you have that level of AI, you can't guarantee that two computers will have the exact same understanding of the command any more than you can expect that two programmers will read a spec in the exact same way. What this means is that the consistency gained in programming languages would be lost. A computer program would no longer generate repeatable results.
  • dougk16 14y ago
    Interesting point, but a counterpoint is that an AI for such purposes could either be deterministic (if it was running on local machines), or it could be a single highly creative and nondeterministic AI running "in the cloud" so to speak. There are also cases where absolute determinism isn't important, like in some games. I think both of our points are somewhat moot though, as I don't see NLP code as something that you would necessarily put up on github. I see it as playing a similar role to DSLs or metaprogramming nowadays, and similarly, it wouldn't always be a good solution. Simple use case: I recently finished an HTML5 puzzle minigame. The layout is pretty simple and has to adjust to window resizes, but the layout can't be done with straight HTML/CSS. So, my resize function is 120 lines of dense javascript, despite being able to describe in a simple paragraph what I would want. Indeed, a simple paragraph is what was given to me in the first place to describe the layout.
    • einhverfr 14y ago
      I think the game example proves my point. You don't play a game by programming the game server. You play the game by itneracting with the computer. These are fundamentally different areas.