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

AppleScript, anyone?

[Sathamoth]

Have anyone tried AppleScript? It's very close-to-natural scripting language, and personally, I think it's awful. For me it's much easier to write things in PHP, Perl or Java than in "human speakable" AppleScript.

Slashdot responds:

[Control Group]

"This is stupid. If you need natural language as a crutch to program, you shouldn't be programming."

"This will open the door to everyone programming, and spell the end of Micro$oft's monopoly."

"This will suck because performance will be crap. Just like Java. Real coders write ASM."

"I remember when they designed FORTRAN and COBOL, so I am qualified to say that this will never work, just like those didn't."

"This will be cool as soon as someone writes a GPL'd version of it."

"IANASECSLOIAOWQTGAEO (I Am Not A Software Engineer, Computer Scientist, Linguist Or In Any Other Way Qualified To Give An Educated Opinion), but..."

"Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of natural language in Soviet Russia jokes?"

(Me? Post flamebait? That's unpossible!)