The State of Natural Language Programming 387
gManZboy writes "Brad Meyers (and co) of the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon have written an interesting paper about the state of natural language programming. They point out that well understood HCI principles aren't finding their way into relatively new languages like Java and C#."
Re:Doesn't seem to say much. (Score:3, Interesting)
However i did visit alice.org. I clicked on gallery and found no way to navigate back!
Seems kinda of odd that a site dedicated to "natural programming" concepts would not take the time to employ "natural navigation". Hmmmmm.
Write a Natural Language Compiler (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I don't see how creating a language that encourages this behaviour can be a good thing. Isn't this the point of learned programmers? The ability to translate real world situations into easy to understand processes? Then again, I'm no language development guru.
I don't quite see the point (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:How about this? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I don't buy it. (Score:5, Interesting)
I would love to see some numbers on the frequency and nature of bugs in software, and I want to see these numbers broken up by language as well as by appliction domain. I suspect that a comprehensive collection of such statistics doesn't exist, since I haven't seen any empirical data enter into the various debates to which they would apply.
Until someone spends some more time researching this information, I doubt that the development of programmign technology will advance in a fashion any more directed or smooth than science and technology did back in the fourteenth century.
Re:Programming in english sucks anyway (Score:3, Interesting)
put the sum of var1 and var2 into varX
or:
set varX to the sum of var1 and var2
or:
add var1 and var2
put the result into varX
English and Computer Language dont Mix Well. (Score:4, Interesting)
Make a List with the values 1, 2, 3, then this is a list of 2,4,3,2, now we are back in the first list with some more values of 5 then 2, now we get an other list inside this list as 2,3,5,6 Now we finish both list.
As you see in english this is clumzy I am sure someone with a better master of english may be able to make it a little more percise but still just giving up and using the () makes it a lot easier to see and understand then using a bunch of words.
Most human languages were made Thousands of years ago. And came from languages 10s of thousands of years old if not Millions of years old. They were not designed for micro processing of infromation. They were required for more common sience reasioning. Which we as humans often fail a lot at and imagin how poor a computer would be a common sience.
Re:Remember Apple Script (Score:3, Interesting)
Not that it's not powerful and fairly easy to use ( you can do a *lot* of fairly amazing stuff with AppleScript that can't really be done otherwise ), but it is _not_ as straightforward as it should be... doing something relatively simple, like string manipulation, just isn't easy. How do you take a path name and add a few characters to it? It's kinda hard to figure out.
Of course, you could blame some of AppleScripts' difficulty-of-use on the unstructured, somewhat here-and-there nature of Apple's documentation of AppleScript, such as the ton of useful, important stuff that appears only in an "AppleScript Additions" PDF ( unlike *any* other AppleScript documentation ).
Something that really jumped out at me from the article is the notion that what's "natural" is defined very specifically by the problem area. Which makes sense... but doesn't lend itself well to general-purpose programming environments. Like some other poster said, oh god, COBOL... general purpose programming environments are going to require constructs and data structures which are well, general, flexible, and thus maybe not "natural" for some problems.
Big deal. If you have a specific problem area, what do you do as a programmer? You write a set of APIs that are specific to that problem area, then use them again and again. You write those APIs in your general purpose programming language and go from there. These folks are trying to solve a problem that isn't as helpful to solve as they think, IMHO. Learning one language and several libraries of APIs is more useful to me than learning several different languages.
Re:Applescript (Score:5, Interesting)
The solution of course was to tell Apple Script that regardless of what hapens, just issue the open application command and stop caring. I spent a good hour or so digging through documentation until I finaly found how to do this, and the answer is so blaringly obvious that it makes one feel stupid when they realize they should have known it all along:That's it.
Re:Programming in english sucks anyway (Score:3, Interesting)
Is it slow? Yeah, it's slow... no doubt. What you'd do is put the power in the methods of the objects, and just let Hypertalk tie the objects together. (For instance, Hypertalk might be too slow to negotiate a fast FTP download, but it's certainly fast enough to contain a statement like "if startDownload is true then tell ftpSocket to start download and place the result at global downloadLocation"
Re:Is this a good idea? i.e. apples vs grapes (Score:3, Interesting)
I understand that the point of this thread is to find a way to remove or to light some "translation" between the "human idea" and the "human computerized/programmed solution". For me, as the years go by, C/C++ is another language built-in myself. I can convert problems into solvable ones via computing, quite on the fly (still planning and designing the solution, but the implementation itself comes in a natural way, like the water that falls down a river).
Re:Is this a good idea? (Score:1, Interesting)