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Metafor: Translating Natural Language to Code
vivin writes "Computer programming is second nature to most of the Slashdot crowd. However, this is not true for the vast majority of people. Formal programming languages are not as expressive or flexible as natural languages. This becomes more evident when we try to translate user requirements into actual code. Researchers at MIT have come up with a program that bridges this gap. It's not so much a tool that turns English into code, as it is a program that translates requirements (in English) to code. When Metafor analyzes English, nouns phrases become objects, verbs become functions, and adjectives become object attributes (or properties). In addition to helping programmers visualize their program better, I think it also promotes writing concise (and therefore) requirements and descriptions. Metafor doesn't handle run-on sentences (or bad English) that well." Update For for the dupe. Not going well. Appreciate all the hate mail. Really encourages improvement.
Lol. I love how stating that the post is a dupe is modded as offtopic. The whole entire article posting should be modded offtopic.
Really, what's it got against Bad English? Okay, so it was Top 40 glurge, but no worse than other "supergroup" bands at the time.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Excuse? Sir, you are way off base.
I'm addressing the fact that some people are arguing the actual need for a dupe-checking methodology greater than what Taco has in place. Not only that, but one of them just got modded to (Score: 5, insightful). That pissed me off, simply because when that happened, it seemed as though it was a affirmative nod to the critic's offensive, off-topic, and Taco-targetted content, when in fact I (personally) don't give a flying leap if the origin article was a dupe or not. I find it a weak basis for a mod that high on an offensive post. If I had meta-mod points left I would have tried to hit that "not insightful" checkbox so hard that the modder would have felt it.
If the critic needs the functionality so bad, they can go and write it themselves, and quit bitching. It's not an open source burnout stance, it's a point of opinion from an offended reader of highly modded Taco critic. I'll side with Taco, immediately, regardless of how he is going to approach the dupe subject in the future, and on whatever time-scale Slashdot chooses. No-one doing this job actually deserves to be treated that way. And if it involves code to produce a fix for some moron's peeve (read: lack of innate brain-based dupe-filter), then they can go and code the thing themselves.
So, no... I will not "cut it with the 'you try and do that' responses". Maybe YOU could come up with that dupe filter it seems you so desperately need. I could care less about such a thing, and what that actually proves to me is that it's superfluous to my daily routine of reading some of the best news the net has to offer in one place.
Your choice to use my post as a springboard to bash the site, or Taco, even further is really nothing more than a grab at attention. I was succinct with my statement, and now that I've explained it to the readers of your post, I have nothing further. Get modded however you like. Thank you very much.