The State of Natural Language Programming

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#."

Comments

I don't buy it.

[vontrotsky]

I disagree with the article's assumption that interesting programming errors are due to people being unable to express themselves "naturally" in code. Rather, I find that almost all errors worthy of debugging come not understanding the problem domain correctly.

jeff

Natural language programming.

[Adhemar]

The virtue of formal texts is that their manipulations, in order to be legitimate, need to satisfy only a few simple rules; they are, when you come to think of it, an amazingly effective tool for ruling out all sorts of nonsense that, when we use our native tongues, are almost impossible to avoid.

- Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, "On the foolishness of natural language programming".
An interesting read.

Re:Is this a good idea?

[Taladar]

The difficult thing with programming isn't usually the syntax but the fact that most people can't cope with the computer doing exactly what they tell it to do.

Specialsied languages are not just for programming

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Natural languages are often not the best way to express problems/concepts concisely. The use of specialised languages is not something that is specific to programming. We (humans) have special languages for all branches of mathematics, chemistry (H2O...), physics (E=Mc2), music, drawing house plans.... These specialised languages came about because natural languages do not provide an effective means for communicating these ideas. For an example, consider some music written in a natural language: "Big drum beat followed by a bit of silence then a soft ....." Imagine trying to read and play that.

Programming is also something that is easier to express in a specialised language. Sure we can make some things more human readable but does that make it easier to understand? The hard part of programming isn't reading/writing the code so much as knowing what structures and concepts to use. Making programming more natural language like will not really make programming easier, you still need skill and practice. Using the music analogy again: I don't play music and can't read music score (the language of music). If Beethoven's fifth (if he ever had a fifth) was rewritten in a natural language it would not make it easier for me to play; I'd still need a whole lot of practice with a piano or whatever to play effectively. Relative to aquiring the piano skills, I expect learning to read sheet music would be relatively simple.

Where natural languaages might help is in system design and requirement capture. Still, however, I think that most often things go wrong because when people are expressing their thoughts in a natural language they use very woolly thinking and use vague terms.