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

Write a Natural Language Compiler

[TheUnFounded]

Write a Natural Language Compiler and you'll find that programmers can't write in a Natural Language. Can you imagine what would happen when you have to understand, not the flow of the code, not the overall process of the application(s), but HOW the writer was THINKING when they wrote the code? I've worked on a couple interesting projects where the programmers originally were involved in the physical business process, and eventually ended up coding (don't ask). When I had to edit their code, there was NO way of understanding it unless you actually talked to them and realized how they were thinking about the problem. It's not that the code was so poor, but they wrote code based on how they'd seen the business operate, and that just didn't translate nicely into straightforward code.

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. :)

Re:I don't buy it.

[Bastian]

One thing that I have noticed about any debate about what programming facilities will most help programmers to write more bug-free code or spend less time debugging is that the debate is based entirely around anecdote.

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.

English and Computer Language dont Mix Well.

[jellomizer]

It Would be nice to send out the specs for the program and run it threw the parser and get the program you want but the truth is that normal Human Language wasn't designed for problemsolving espectilly in some of the details that programming requires. Things like nested Lists. (1,2,3,(2,4,3,2),5,2,(2,3,5,6)) Which are easy to learn to program and install are much harder with natural language.

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:Applescript

[MoneyT]

Probably because it's too obvious. I ran into that problem a few months ago. Version 6 of matlab for OS X had a unique problem in that one needed to start X11 and then start Matlab before it could be run, there wasn't a single command to do both. Of course, this lead to confusion on the part of our users, and so the simple and obvious solution would be to write an apple script to do it. That was the easy part:

tell Finder to open application X11
tell Finder to open application MatLab

The problem was, in the way that Matlab was setup, the helper app used to launch MatLab in the X11 environment never truely opens (it bounces in the dock for a while and then goes away having begun the true MatLab startup. The end result of this was that since Apple Script was not being notified that the application had finished opening, it was recieving an error that startup had failed and kept retrying the start. This resulted in an infinate loop of MatLab window creation.

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:

ignoring all errors
tell Finder to open application MatLab

That's it.

Re:Is this a good idea? i.e. apples vs grapes

[faragon]

To compare the natural language (Noam Chomsky tells that it is universal for every human language) with any programming language it is quite non-sense: programming languages tends to unambiguation, to be context free and deterministic. It's quite similar to compare an image versus a verbal description of it: the image it is finite and unambiguous, while the verbal description only can be arbitrary.

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).