4 ms·

This makes me think it might be easier to get humans to speak a language that computers can understand rather than trying to get computers to understand our cur

• ricree 17y ago
  It might be. I'm reminded of a story I read about Palm designing their early PDFs. At that point, they had only experienced marginal success interpreting written text. There were a lot of ambiguities, and the actual style varied a lot from person to person, so it tended to fail outside of carefully controlled tests. Eventually, someone hit on the idea of forcing the users into a custom set of symbols that was close enough to normal to be usable, but was different enough that it forced everyone into a common style that was easier to parse. Of course, the tricky part is to come up with a method that is expressive enough to be useful without ending up with one of those "natural" programming languages.