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Agreed. It seems an appalling number of people agree with Dijkstra here - "we not only don't need natural language, we don't even want it." I'm sorry, but if

Agreed. It seems an appalling number of people agree with Dijkstra here - "we not only don't need natural language, we don't even want it." I'm sorry, but if I can express to a human being a set of directions to fill out a form in a minute or two and expressing that to a computer takes much longer and is more error-prone, that is an inefficiency in software development which it is extremely desirable to address. There is nothing magical about human brains that would make them theoretically impossible to express in software in such a way that we can give a program natural language directions, and the fact that so many people want to dismiss this endeavor out of hand is ridiculous to me. This should be our holy grail, something to strive toward, not something to ignore. In fact I would suggest that it will most likely be the only way out of the mess of such a wide variety of software standards (ever have fun moving your things to a new system and having to re-learn many things just because you changed PC or phone operating systems?), whereas natural language is a standard we already have and works fine. This way you essentially wouldn't need to learn a new set of incantations - just tell the damn thing what you want the damn thing to do, dammit.

autokad 12y ago
if someone believed half the comments, you'd think humans have not the slightest clue what each other is talking about.
- anthony_d 12y ago
  If you don't hear at least a sentence a day where you haven't the slightest clue what was said, then I suspect you don't encounter many humans.
  - autokad 12y ago
    You're exaggerating, but thats ok. If I don't, then I simply ask them to clarify.
    - 305b283f 12y ago
      An error rate of 1/1,000 or so, with almost all of them being recoverable errors? I'll take that. :)
    - anthony_d 12y ago
      This could be a personal shortcoming but I am frequently left clueless what was meant. For low volume interactive situations asking for clarification is fine as long as the domain is simple. Gathering requirements is generally done in natural language, but it's a very slow error-prone process. Even after sign-off on requirements it's pretty standard for them to be wrong in critical ways. Frankly this is the part of many software development projects that dooms them to failure. Ignoring the difficulty of actually getting precise natural language, you'll still get to the point where no one can understand the language. If you don't believe me, go read some Kant. I'd appoligize for the rambling comment with grammatical and spelling mistakes, but they further my point :)
    - JabavuAdams 12y ago
      This is key. We don't generally build computer systems that are capable of asking for clarification, but we should.
mkesper 12y ago
There is nothing magical about human brains that would make them theoretically impossible to express in software in such a way that we can give a program natural language direction I think we are still a long way from understanding what really happens inside our brains. About telling a computer what to do: They don't 'do' anything. They run programs. (Free after Weizenbaum)
- 305b283f 12y ago
  > I think we are still a long way from understanding what really happens inside our brains. Agreed 100% - I'm in no way saying that it's easy or will be done in our lifetime or the next 10 lifetimes - just that it's not impossible because we're not magic and we do it every damn day. > About telling a computer what to do: They don't 'do' anything. They run programs. (Free after Weizenbaum) What I want is (to reference an example in another comment) to go to a command line and type "Copy the report to the share" and (if I'm on a linux box) have my computer translate that to "cp /path/to/report.pdf /path/to/share/" without my ever having to know what it's doing behind the scenes. Whatever categorical bucket someone wants to put that in doesn't matter to me whatsoever - all I'm saying is that's what I want to see, and that's what I think we should work toward.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    What'd help get there is, an object store instead of a file system. We continue to hang files on the ceremonial file tree like xmas ornaments and call it an OS feature. But nearly zero real apps are happy with that. Everybody implements an object store inside a file, and keeps all their crap organized in there (email folders; docx files; project databases and on and on). When will we get an OS that lets me persist my objects, uniquely identify them with a uuid plus arbitrary attributes (print date??? give me a break), migrate and cache them anywhere and sign them for authenticity? That would be a real OS feature. Sure all that can be cobbled together on one machine with different libraries. But to be an OS feature, I need servers that understand and respect all that. Object browsers that let me create a relation to view pertinent objects. Security managers that limit access to apps with digital authority etc. All on the network.
the_af 12y ago
The thing is, natural language suffers from many of the same problems. I'd say it's even worse, because it requires a common cultural background between the interlocutors. Ever moved to a new job and had fun figuring out the local terminology, and learning the in-jokes (and figuring out when you were the butt of the joke but didn't quite get it), and when your boss told you to "just do your damn job and quit pestering me", did you immediately know he was just having a bad day and it wasn't your fault at all? A mistake in understanding these "natural language incantations" will lead to you doing the wrong thing, or feeling embarrassed or depressed. Not so different from a system crash, when you think about it. Thankfully machines never feel embarrassed or confused about the "damn thing" you want them to do. They only do the things we tell them, in a painfully literal way. After all, when people want to be really precise, they use mathematical notation :)
- 305b283f 12y ago
  Of course you are technically correct, however I retreat back to my main point: we do this every day and it works just fine. Certainly not perfectly of course, but go and ask people who use some sort of CRUD system that used to be manual what they like and what they dislike about the new system. Likely very few of them will say it is easier to use than just asking Sharon in the next cubicle to verify something. They will have some likes, sure - but they will be things like the almost infinitely increased speed or the fact that they can access the system 24/7 while Sharon needs to sleep and take a break to eat the occasional Ding-Dong, but the ease of use that comes with dealing with another human being is a sacrifice that they make for these benefits. (or to put it the reverse way, imagine the same office and a new employee named Eliza comes in and behaves exactly like a computer, "only doing the things you tell her in a painfully literal way." How quick would you want to give her the boot?) > After all, when people want to be really precise, they use mathematical notation :) Again, this is absolutely true. The problem is when you're dealing with a simple CRUD app for your insurance house or just copying files over to your iPod, you're not interested in being really precise - you're interested in the shortest path to get a relatively simple thing done. If that path is blocked by the fact that you don't know the particular menu item, keyboard shortcut, or command switch for something that you can express in English without even thinking about it, then I regard that as a huge opportunity for technology in general and our industry in particular.
ScottBurson 12y ago
Error: line 2: 'damnit': no denotation Just kidding. I agree: pace Prof. Dr. Dijkstra, automatic programming is a grand challenge problem and deserves more attention.
phkahler 12y ago
>> This way you essentially wouldn't need to learn a new set of incantations - just tell the damn thing what you want the damn thing to do, dammit. I'm going to guess that you've never given a set of requirements to a programmer before. Programmers ARE the human interface to computers, as they are often writing software to specifications created by someone else. Many of the problems arise in the ambiguity of the human-human communication. Another part comes from the lack of specificity combined with different ideas about how to handle unspecified cases. Your idea of what is obvious is not the only one. Some people lack domain knowledge that is assumed in requirements and leads to poor choices where specifications are not complete. In the end, natural language assumes a broad swath of "common sense" that computers do not have yet.
- scoofy 12y ago
  Again, this is a problem of imprecise communication on the part of the speaker. It is a human problem, not natural language one.
- 305b283f 12y ago
  I'll respond to your points, but was the ad-hominem really necessary? > In the end, natural language assumes a broad swath of "common sense" that computers do not have yet. Absolutely. I'm not at all saying that we'd have had this last Tuesday if we'd just take our heads out of our asses - I'm saying it's something we should strive toward and not ignore. > Many of the problems arise in the ambiguity of the human-human communication. Human-Human communication works, and works well - once again, we do it every single day, all the time. Do we encounter problems with ambiguity? Sure. But they are by far the exception and not the norm. After all, forms get filled out, Driver's licenses get renewed, complicated Starbucks orders get filled - these common use cases work. By contrast, have you ever had this fun experience with a terminal program? > quit Unknown command: "quit" > exit Unknown command: "exit" > shutdown Unknown command: "shutdown" or my favorite: > quit Unknown command "quit." If you want to close the program, type "exit." Simple English statements like these work extremely well in human-human communication and do not work hardly at all in human-computer communication. I'd just like us to get from A to B, that's all.
exelius 12y ago
I don't think EWD's point is that we don't need natural language at all; just that it's not a good way to program a computer. Which I do believe to be true. We can explain to a human how to fill out a form because the human has probably seen a lot of forms before. Humans make a lot of assumptions that often end up being wrong: but enough of them are correct that they're still useful. We trust computers to be unimpeachably accurate because we as humans are not. If computers need to make the types of assumptions that humans do, then they lose a good deal of their accuracy (and their usefulness). Human language is also visually difficult to read. The biggest improvement that symbolic languages (specifically, modern programming languages) make is the use of spacing and symbols to break apart complex processes into sub-sections, loops, etc. Furthermore, I disagree with your statement that "natural language is a standard we already have and works fine." Language is not static, nor is it standard. Sure, we may have "standard" grammar rules, but even those can vary from region to region and many people don't follow the rules on a day to day basis. It's not a static target, so developing something that could interpret natural language means developing an artificial intelligence capable of taking nuance, context and the like into account. EWD was simply claiming that such a system applied to general purpose computing would be so complicated as to be wildly impractical.

autokad 12y ago

if someone believed half the comments, you'd think humans have not the slightest clue what each other is talking about.

anthony_d 12y ago
If you don't hear at least a sentence a day where you haven't the slightest clue what was said, then I suspect you don't encounter many humans.
- autokad 12y ago
  You're exaggerating, but thats ok. If I don't, then I simply ask them to clarify.
  - 305b283f 12y ago
    An error rate of 1/1,000 or so, with almost all of them being recoverable errors? I'll take that. :)
  - anthony_d 12y ago
    This could be a personal shortcoming but I am frequently left clueless what was meant. For low volume interactive situations asking for clarification is fine as long as the domain is simple. Gathering requirements is generally done in natural language, but it's a very slow error-prone process. Even after sign-off on requirements it's pretty standard for them to be wrong in critical ways. Frankly this is the part of many software development projects that dooms them to failure. Ignoring the difficulty of actually getting precise natural language, you'll still get to the point where no one can understand the language. If you don't believe me, go read some Kant. I'd appoligize for the rambling comment with grammatical and spelling mistakes, but they further my point :)
  - JabavuAdams 12y ago
    This is key. We don't generally build computer systems that are capable of asking for clarification, but we should.

mkesper 12y ago

There is nothing magical about human brains that would make them theoretically impossible to express in software in such a way that we can give a program natural language direction I think we are still a long way from understanding what really happens inside our brains. About telling a computer what to do: They don't 'do' anything. They run programs. (Free after Weizenbaum)

305b283f 12y ago
> I think we are still a long way from understanding what really happens inside our brains. Agreed 100% - I'm in no way saying that it's easy or will be done in our lifetime or the next 10 lifetimes - just that it's not impossible because we're not magic and we do it every damn day. > About telling a computer what to do: They don't 'do' anything. They run programs. (Free after Weizenbaum) What I want is (to reference an example in another comment) to go to a command line and type "Copy the report to the share" and (if I'm on a linux box) have my computer translate that to "cp /path/to/report.pdf /path/to/share/" without my ever having to know what it's doing behind the scenes. Whatever categorical bucket someone wants to put that in doesn't matter to me whatsoever - all I'm saying is that's what I want to see, and that's what I think we should work toward.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  What'd help get there is, an object store instead of a file system. We continue to hang files on the ceremonial file tree like xmas ornaments and call it an OS feature. But nearly zero real apps are happy with that. Everybody implements an object store inside a file, and keeps all their crap organized in there (email folders; docx files; project databases and on and on). When will we get an OS that lets me persist my objects, uniquely identify them with a uuid plus arbitrary attributes (print date??? give me a break), migrate and cache them anywhere and sign them for authenticity? That would be a real OS feature. Sure all that can be cobbled together on one machine with different libraries. But to be an OS feature, I need servers that understand and respect all that. Object browsers that let me create a relation to view pertinent objects. Security managers that limit access to apps with digital authority etc. All on the network.

the_af 12y ago

The thing is, natural language suffers from many of the same problems. I'd say it's even worse, because it requires a common cultural background between the interlocutors. Ever moved to a new job and had fun figuring out the local terminology, and learning the in-jokes (and figuring out when you were the butt of the joke but didn't quite get it), and when your boss told you to "just do your damn job and quit pestering me", did you immediately know he was just having a bad day and it wasn't your fault at all? A mistake in understanding these "natural language incantations" will lead to you doing the wrong thing, or feeling embarrassed or depressed. Not so different from a system crash, when you think about it. Thankfully machines never feel embarrassed or confused about the "damn thing" you want them to do. They only do the things we tell them, in a painfully literal way. After all, when people want to be really precise, they use mathematical notation :)

305b283f 12y ago
Of course you are technically correct, however I retreat back to my main point: we do this every day and it works just fine. Certainly not perfectly of course, but go and ask people who use some sort of CRUD system that used to be manual what they like and what they dislike about the new system. Likely very few of them will say it is easier to use than just asking Sharon in the next cubicle to verify something. They will have some likes, sure - but they will be things like the almost infinitely increased speed or the fact that they can access the system 24/7 while Sharon needs to sleep and take a break to eat the occasional Ding-Dong, but the ease of use that comes with dealing with another human being is a sacrifice that they make for these benefits. (or to put it the reverse way, imagine the same office and a new employee named Eliza comes in and behaves exactly like a computer, "only doing the things you tell her in a painfully literal way." How quick would you want to give her the boot?) > After all, when people want to be really precise, they use mathematical notation :) Again, this is absolutely true. The problem is when you're dealing with a simple CRUD app for your insurance house or just copying files over to your iPod, you're not interested in being really precise - you're interested in the shortest path to get a relatively simple thing done. If that path is blocked by the fact that you don't know the particular menu item, keyboard shortcut, or command switch for something that you can express in English without even thinking about it, then I regard that as a huge opportunity for technology in general and our industry in particular.

ScottBurson 12y ago

Error: line 2: 'damnit': no denotation Just kidding. I agree: pace Prof. Dr. Dijkstra, automatic programming is a grand challenge problem and deserves more attention.

phkahler 12y ago

>> This way you essentially wouldn't need to learn a new set of incantations - just tell the damn thing what you want the damn thing to do, dammit. I'm going to guess that you've never given a set of requirements to a programmer before. Programmers ARE the human interface to computers, as they are often writing software to specifications created by someone else. Many of the problems arise in the ambiguity of the human-human communication. Another part comes from the lack of specificity combined with different ideas about how to handle unspecified cases. Your idea of what is obvious is not the only one. Some people lack domain knowledge that is assumed in requirements and leads to poor choices where specifications are not complete. In the end, natural language assumes a broad swath of "common sense" that computers do not have yet.

scoofy 12y ago
Again, this is a problem of imprecise communication on the part of the speaker. It is a human problem, not natural language one.
305b283f 12y ago
I'll respond to your points, but was the ad-hominem really necessary? > In the end, natural language assumes a broad swath of "common sense" that computers do not have yet. Absolutely. I'm not at all saying that we'd have had this last Tuesday if we'd just take our heads out of our asses - I'm saying it's something we should strive toward and not ignore. > Many of the problems arise in the ambiguity of the human-human communication. Human-Human communication works, and works well - once again, we do it every single day, all the time. Do we encounter problems with ambiguity? Sure. But they are by far the exception and not the norm. After all, forms get filled out, Driver's licenses get renewed, complicated Starbucks orders get filled - these common use cases work. By contrast, have you ever had this fun experience with a terminal program? > quit Unknown command: "quit" > exit Unknown command: "exit" > shutdown Unknown command: "shutdown" or my favorite: > quit Unknown command "quit." If you want to close the program, type "exit." Simple English statements like these work extremely well in human-human communication and do not work hardly at all in human-computer communication. I'd just like us to get from A to B, that's all.

exelius 12y ago

I don't think EWD's point is that we don't need natural language at all; just that it's not a good way to program a computer. Which I do believe to be true. We can explain to a human how to fill out a form because the human has probably seen a lot of forms before. Humans make a lot of assumptions that often end up being wrong: but enough of them are correct that they're still useful. We trust computers to be unimpeachably accurate because we as humans are not. If computers need to make the types of assumptions that humans do, then they lose a good deal of their accuracy (and their usefulness). Human language is also visually difficult to read. The biggest improvement that symbolic languages (specifically, modern programming languages) make is the use of spacing and symbols to break apart complex processes into sub-sections, loops, etc. Furthermore, I disagree with your statement that "natural language is a standard we already have and works fine." Language is not static, nor is it standard. Sure, we may have "standard" grammar rules, but even those can vary from region to region and many people don't follow the rules on a day to day basis. It's not a static target, so developing something that could interpret natural language means developing an artificial intelligence capable of taking nuance, context and the like into account. EWD was simply claiming that such a system applied to general purpose computing would be so complicated as to be wildly impractical.