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.

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.