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.

Comments

Usefulness

[suso]

Well, I doubt something like this would be used to write the next version of Gimp, but I can see its use in helping people to convey what they want a computer to do. Few people need to write programs and I don't know whether I'd want people who don't
understand computers to actually write them. But it would help when someone wants to make something like a 3D scene in Blender. It reminds me a lot of that episode of STTNG (Schizims) where Riker, Troy and Worf are telling the computer to replicate an alien room that they were in.

Dupe

[tcopeland]

Of this, I think...

Re:Dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm about to write a program that stops dupes:

"Don't allow dupes."

There, now I have to decide whether it will be FOSS.

Re:Dupe

[FortKnox]

No fears, he's issued an update:

Update For for the dupe. Not going well. Appreciate all the hate mail. Really encourages improvement.

Nice. Someone should go to customer service 101 and grow up a little. Yelling at the people who (indirectly) line your wallet. Not a good idea....

Re:Dupe

[FortKnox]

To actually add content to my content:

How terribly difficult would it be to add a url checker. I can understand a dupe when its an article written differently by two publications, but a simple URL checker can state "this url was used in store XYZ [with link]," so the editor can determine if its a dupe story or just a url used in two different stories...

Re:Dupe

[phasm42]

I like how he duped the word "for" in his comment: Update for for the dupe.

Re:Dupe

[poot_rootbeer]

Update For for the dupe. Not going well. Appreciate all the hate mail. Really encourages improvement.

I fed this text into Metafor and it core dumped on me!

Re:Dupe

[1u3hr]

Update For for the dupe. Not going well. Appreciate all the hate mail. Really encourages improvement.

Is he drunk or something (For for??) At least we know he reads the hate mail, so send more. Ignoring stupid avoidable fuckups certainly doesn't work.
They can either
1) implement a simple function that compares the main words in the article with recent ones, particularly URLs (ignoring some obvious generic ones, like the home page of newspapers). (For extra credit, spellcheck the fucking thing, and check that any URLS exist.)

2)Read the mail that comes in from subscribers telling them they've duped (apparetly that's mostly ignored; when I send it in it often bounces, some editora apparently have invalid forwardnig addresses)

3)Or use their own brains and just type one relevant word into the Slashdot search box:
Search 'metafor'
Metafor: Translating Natural Language to Code
On March 30th, 2005 with 170 comments
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...

English To Code Converter
On March 26th, 2005 with 52 comments
prostoalex writes "Metafor from MIT is a code visualization utility, capable of converting high-level descriptions into class and function (or method...

Re:Dupe

[Darth_Burrito]

Or a spell checker, or a secondary read-only review queue, or any number of other things....

Re:Dupe

[snorklewacker]

> How terribly difficult would it be to add a url checker

These are paid editors who can't be bothered to read their own website. The problem is not technological, and doesn't require a technological fix.

Re:Dupe

[TheDauthi]

I'm sorry, I've already patented that software. My army of lightly-armed attack lawyers will be there shortly.

Very Cute

[AKAImBatman]

While this is a cute concept, I don't think you'll be seeing computer programmers disappearing any time soon. The natural language bent was the original point of high level languages. Early languages like COBOL, SNOBOL, and BASIC were all designed to abstract programming to a level of natural language. Save for BASIC's success as a beginner's language, none of them accomplished their goal. In fact, the "natural language" design of COBOL only served to complicate the language and cause a variety of errors due to missing periods, improper spacing, and other common typing mistakes.

It wasn't long before it was reul languages actually broke away from English and relied more heavily on easily-parsable, special characters to define structure. We can see the results of this in today's C/C++, Java, LISP, PERL (bleh), and Python languages. This new interface does nothing but try to perform some of the structural thinking done by the programmer. (Although I have my doubts as to its current real world ability.)

So the question that then comes to bear is, "Who would use this natural language interface?" Sadly, the answer is most likely "programmers". But why would a programmer use this interface if he has to be trained in computer logic in the first place? It would seem like an unnecessary level of abstraction that would only serve to hinder a programmer's natural abilities.

Of course, there is the documentation issue. Supposedly this interface will be useful for producing requirements in addition to code. But who produces the requirements? Not the programmer. That's usually the job of the business analyst, someone who may not even have experience with coding logic. And for code documentation, nothing quite beats the JavaDoc style documentation that has become popular in the last few years.

I think that research like this is interesting, but I doubt it will have many uses until AI and voice recognition improves to a level similar to that seen in Star Trek. Only about 300 more years and counting. ;-)

Re:Very Cute

[krgallagher]

"But who produces the requirements? Not the programmer. That's usually the job of the business analyst, someone who may not even have experience with coding logic.

Yeah that is what I was thinking. For this to be usefull, the requirements have to written in a format that mirrors programming logic. If you are not a progrmmer, you probably do not think in that kind of logic. That is why most the the requirements documents I see are incomplete and open to interpretation.

Re:Very Cute

[AKAImBatman]

My guess is that if you're having trouble wrapping your head around OOP, then you're going to have trouble wrapping your head around the ins and outs of a natural language interface.

For what it's worth, OOP is quite easy. The first thing you need to think is data encapsulation. Data encapsulation is simply the practice of bundling related data together. i.e. Color, make, year, and model are all attributes of a car. So you'd tend to put them together. You know, like structs. For example, a game sprite might have x, y, width, height, and direction variables.

class Sprite
{
int x;
int y;
int width;
int height;
int direction;
}

Of course, we want to know what the direction stands for, so we add static constants:

class Sprite
{
const RIGHT = 0;
const LEFT = 1;
const UP = 2;
const DOWN = 3;

int x;
int y;
int width;
int height;
int direction = RIGHT;
}

Now for the truly OOP part. We need a way of making the data operate on itself. For an example, I'll choose changing direction.

class Sprite
{
const RIGHT = 0;
const LEFT = 1;
const UP = 2;
const DOWN = 3;

int x;
int y;
int width;
int height;
int direction = RIGHT;

void changeDirection(int dir)
{
direction = dir;
}
}

Doesn't seem like much, but what if we want to ignore improper directions?

class Sprite
{
const RIGHT = 0;
const LEFT = 1;
const UP = 2;
const DOWN = 3;

int x;
int y;
int width;
int height;
int direction = RIGHT;

void changeDirection(int dir)
{
if(dir < 0 || dir > 3) return;

direction = dir;
}
}

In a real OOP program, we'd probably throw an exception, but you get the idea I hope. Now that we have our Sprite class, it can be treated as a complete data type of its own:

Sprite sprite = new Sprite();

sprite.changeDirection(Sprite.DOWN);

There you have it. A five minute introduction to OOP. Hopefully this will help unblock whatever mental issue is in your way. (Or badly written books as the case may be.) :-)

(Stupid lameness filter. Recognize code will you? No, that would be too difficult wouldn't it? Stupid lameness filter. Did I mention how stupid the lameness filter is? Recognize code will you? Stupid lameness filter. Recognize code will you? Stupid lameness filter. Recognize code will you? Stupid lameness filter. Recognize code will you? Stupid lameness filter. Recognize code will you? Stupid lameness filter. Recognize code will you? Stupid lameness filter. Recognize code will you? Stupid lameness filter. Recognize code will you?)

Re:Very Cute

[bratboy]

I think that most "real" programmers will have approximately the same reaction to this, which will be somewhere between a shrug and a snicker. To be an effective programmer you need to be able to accept certain formalisms, and for people who "get it" (i.e., are vulnerable to the snow crash virus) high level programming languages are quite readable. (have you ever tried explaining to a neophyte why you would use do-while vs. while{} vs. for(;;)? or variables?)

In working with designers (especially inexperienced ones) on video game projects, one of the things I noticed is that they have no conception of what is possible and what isn't. They will agonize for a week on how to simplify something that isn't actually difficult, and then assume that you can easily throw in something that's impossible. Part of becoming an experienced designer is learning the difference between the two.

Junior programmers have a different problem - they don't know how to structure their programs. Building experience is primarily learning patterns you can use to solve problems (a good, experienced programmer will look at "Design Patterns" and be able to tick off a large percentage that s/he uses, but never formalized, and maybe disagree with one or two). Switching to natural language for code specification isn't going to help.

The one area in which this might be useful is in scripting languages - using the video game example: when you want your designers to be able to put together behaviors for agents without having to learn some arbitrary language that you've thrown together. You're still probably going to have to have a programmer give the scripts the once over to make sure that they're not doing something silly, but it might be a more approachable interface for the designers.

It would actually be much more useful to have an IDE which allowed you to add graphics or voice as comments (how many times have I wanted to add a small sketch as a comment to some graphics code?).

daniel

Re:Very Cute

[ArsonSmith]

I want to do this backwards. Can I feed it source code and have it output natural language?

Re:Very Cute

[Harassed]

I'm afraid that your code infringes my patent #3254324 "Method of writing computer code using ASCII characters so that they can be displayed on an internet site"

Re:Very Cute

[jericho4.0]

C++, the language many people firt work with in OOP, is not the easiest way to go about it. If you already know C, look at Objective-C. It is C + a very small set of OOP extensions.

If you don't know C, look at Python.

The OOP paradigm is much easier to get in the right language.

Re:Very Cute

[AKAImBatman]

My favourite OO language is PHP4

*Shudder*

PHP4 aside, I'm not really sure what is so difficult to understand about OOP, so maybe you can help me understand the mental block some people have. Here's my five minute buildup. Let me know where it is that you had hangups.

OOP at its core is a way of designing your code so that related data and behaviors are encapsulated together. That is OOP. Period. End of story. Many languages can implement this, including JavaScript, PHP, and even C! (Amazing what one can accomplish with some function pointers. ;-))

This means that the proper way to design code is now to achieve the end goal by first matching each object to a "real" concept that will exist in the final product. This allows for a "divide and conquer" strategy whereby programmers flesh out each object independent of the rest.

Unfortuately, OOP leads to several related concepts which tend to be quite confusing. For example, inheritence is a natural extension to OOP philosophy. By piling up contained data and methods, an object can go from being a generic "catch-all" to a specific description of the modelled object.

Once you have inheritence, though, then you suddenly have a situation involving polymorphism. You can refer to an object by its parent type (e.g. Car) and expect it to work just fine, but you can also investgate some of the special features of the more specific sub-class (e.g. Cavalier).

Even more interesting, is the concept of an ADT. At its core, ADT really just describes how a given set of entities can be used to define another. A common example is money. You have dollars, and you have cents. It differs from a regular number in that 1/100th is the smallest unit allowed. An ADT encapsulation allows you to enforce these rules. This example, however, tends to be rather... erm... abstract.

A more solid example is a plane. A plane is an object. But a plane is made up of a fusilage, wings, and engines. Each of those are objects unto themselves, which can be further broken down into concepts like control surfaces, turbines, windows, etc. The only difference with computers, is that we stop when we can finally represent the structure at the lowest level a computer can understand: binary encodings. For practical purposes, binary encodings refers to integers, floating point numbers, and strings of bytes or words.

Am I forgetting any core concepts here?

The two things I usually see people trip up on are:

1. A false sense of encapsulation. Encapsulation implies instantiation. i.e. The code is a description of a data structure. You should be able to reuse that data structure as many times as you like, and you should be able to use it as a single entity. This is not always understood, and results in downright silly "OO" implementations like that seen in Visual Basic and VBA. (VB simply collects a set of functions under a given filename. There's no real opportunity to instantiate the object and pass it around in variables.)

2. Difficulty in breaking the linear code habit. Many coders never really got beyond the concept of writing pages and pages of procedural code. The only reason why they use functions at all is because they were told to. They tend to misunderstand why a function is discreet, and have been known to heavily abuse global variables. Unfortunately, this problem goes deeper than a misunderstanding of OOP, and must be corrected before OOP can be introduced at all.

I can imagine...

[JamesP]

Verbs translated to functions?? Nouns to variables??

int jerk_at_counter, hottie_in_accountancy, dork_at_it;

kill(boss);
send(intern,hell);

Yeah, that will work...

Re:I can imagine...

[Infinityis]

I'll bet this will cause problems for SCO...The only code they can patent by this method is

while (true) {
file(lawsuit);
}

Great!

[Eusebo]

Now all we need is a tool that will take a user's brain and turn it into solid requirements.

of little value here!

[hugesmile]

Metafor doesn't handle run-on sentences (or bad English) that well."

Forget it being a tool for this crowd then!

It is coming to pass...

[HaeMaker]

"Make it possible for programmers to write programs in English, and you will find that programmers can not write in English."

http://www.murphys-laws.com/murphy/murphy-comput er .html

Bad English

[bmac83]

How well would Metafor handle English like "nouns phrases become objects"?

Because the average joe wants to be a programmer?

[Proc6]

Yeah, I know my neighbor with an IQ of 7 would rather be writing code that parses XML work orders and turns them into statistical graphs than watching NASCAR. It's just that complicated Java syntax kicks his ass so he's kicking back with a 6 pack of Black Label waiting for this technology to come out.

Oh, great...

[tomhudson]

Just what the world needs, a way for more non-coders to produce ssss-hhhhh-iiiii-[tt]tt-yyyy software.

I'm sure we've all experimented with header files that define an english-like syntax for our code. We've dumped it for a reason - it's not as efficient.

Hiding what's going on "under the hood" is never a good thing. Good code, like good food, depends on good ingredients, and the knowledge of how to combine them.

Crap food, on the other hand, can be produced by anyone with a stove and delusions of cooking ability.

Re:Oh, great...

[Otter]

Yes, that's excellent reasoning. Anyone who isn't a trained chef should be denied access to their stove, and it should be made impossible for anyone untrained (or out of practice) in languages that meet your standard of snobbishness to solve their problems without having to pay you.

Re:Oh, great...

[Taladar]

Anyone who had never even watched someone cook something for a few hours and just knows the names of the meals that taste best but doesn't even know the names of all ingredients or how they look raw should be denied access to a stove, yes.

Re:Oh, great...

[tomhudson]

nd it should be made impossible for anyone untrained (or out of practice) in languages that meet your standard of snobbishness

Definitely, at least when it comes to business apps.

Would you trust a surgeon who's 15 years out-of-date to operate on you?

So, would you trust someone to write code who is even a couple of years out of date? Things change rapidly in this field, dude. Us old far[tt]s remember when it was a kinder, gentler world ... but it's not like that any more.

Just like you wouldn't give a young kid unfettered access to a stove without supervision, it would be insane to trust your business to someone who hasn't got a clue when it comes to what's going on under the hood.

Again, to extend YOUR analogy, would you like your chef to be someone who doesn't have the basic concepts of hygeine? Proper food handling? Food storage?

In other words, can you say "hamburger disease"?

It's not a question of paying me. Most users DON'T know WHAT the FUCK they WANT. They think programs magically leap into being. Watch requirements change as you work on something. Feature bloat, contradictory requirements, bad data designs, stuff that just doesn't work, or gives 50+20-20=30 (like slashcode) ...

Anyone who hasn't had a few basic lessons (even if it's only from mom and dad) should NOT be using a stove. Just look at how many french-fry fires there are every year, a lot of them by kids.

It's not snobbishness, any more than it's snobbish to acknowledge a doctor's expertise, and keep others from operating on people without proper training and adherence to reasonable standards by keeping current. Or do you want to be like that guy in Bosnia who tried to remove a kidney stone trapped in his dick?

Doomed to failure

[rde]

I don't mean to sound pessimistic, but remember who comes up with functional specs; managers. As a consequence, this poor program may well come up with a framework that matches exactly what was requested, but once it's put together, the suits will say "it doesn't do this". When it's pointed out that that wasn't in the spec, the inevitable response will be "but it was implied; it should be obvious that we'd need it to do that." This is just a core dump waiting to happen.

Re:Doomed to failure

[LegendOfLink]

Your reasoning makes sense, but I think something like this is absolutely necessary. If it wasn't for the managers who created the guidelines and specs, there'd be no direction for the programmers to take.

Invariably, this is the situation where those who make the specs need to be at a higher level than those who code the project. The article is right, we don't think in C++, we think in English.

I can't wait to see what kind of new things this project brings about.

you must be new here

[avi33]

Computer programming is second nature to most of the Slashdot crowd.

Maybe back in 1998, but haughty sniping is second nature to most of the Slashdot crowd now.

Re:you must be new here

[NardofDoom]

Am I the only one who read "haughty sniping" as "freakin' campers?"

This story is a dupe, but

[GreyWolf3000]

I think the idea has been around a long time. The whole object oriented paradigm (in addition to providing useful functionality like dynamic function binding) is designed to shape code around human thought.

One of the things that really bothers me about Linux is the pervasiveness of languages like C that make no attempt to model higher thought and instead force the developer to constantly re-learn old unusable APIs and shove ancient hacks that are unreadable just to get drivers working. Objects in code need their a[tt]ributes to mirror real-word equivalents, otherwise reading the code is impossible because no one else can make sense of all the confusing acronyms and variable names.

I actually think that .NET is the right step for us. Mono is really the first sensible language (Java doesn't count; it's not free) that has any mindshare for Linux, and let's face it the Linux world needs it. Until writing software for Linux can just be a simple translation of designs in our heads to GUI design and implementation, Linux will lag behind the rest of the world because of how long it takes to write software for it.

With All Due Respect...

[schestowitz]

I wish that people spoke mathematically rather than poor and ambiguous languages that can now (supposedly) turn into (ambiguous) code. Can one really rely on translated 'code' like this. That's like sending an E-mail from speech-to-text recognition without proof-reading.

Re:With All Due Respect...

[Alien Being]

"I wish that people spoke mathematically rather than poor and ambiguous languages"

You fail it.

Rules

[igny]

How hard is it to change rules of treating the sentences? Can Metaphor learn Chinese, for example?

Re:Translate this:

[tomhudson]

No, you've got it all wrong:

IF: subject of new article is same as previous article
THEN: Post, baby, post!
ALSO: Fire person who bothered to check for dupe post, as they do not meet slashdot's editor requirements.

I know that code is in there somewhere ...

Doomed to fail?

[PissingInTheWind]

From Dijkstra's timeless "How do we tell truths that might hurt?":

Projects promoting programming in "natural language" are intrinsically doomed to fail.

He said that 30 years ago. People still don't listen.

Re:Doomed to fail?

[subrosas]

A lot of work has been on explicitly and unambiguously coding / capturing the semantics in natural language. True natural language programming might be impossible, but by chasing this Quixiotic goal, other more limited purposes might be enabled on the way.

Re:Doomed to fail?

[MenTaLguY]

So is that an axiom then? That what Dijkstra said 30 years ago is true. I certainly don't see any arguments building up to your conclusion.

That would have been unnecessary, given a better citation. Which portions of Dijkstra's original argument are no longer applicable?

I seem to remember Dijkstra saying that people educated with gotos were irreperably impaired and couldn't write good code and yet there is a generation of successful coders out there who grew up with BASIC and yet had no problem pushing the boundaries with more sophisticated programming styles as fashions changed.

That was a weaker argument. Yet, as part of that generation, I wouldn't say there was "no problem". For many years I had to struggle against habits learned during that time, in order to use more structured approaches effectively. I have also seen similar struggles in my contemporaries.

Re:Doomed to fail?

[MenTaLguY]

Did you really struggle against old habits? Many programmers I know, who were brought up on BASIC, turned out to be the strongest zealots for other types of programming and weren't held back by some extra knowledge about gotos at all.

Yes, I did. The knowledge wasn't a problem, but the habits that came from using them extensively were obstacles to constructing useful abstractions. Note that I grew up with old-school BASIC. Mandatory line numbers, and GOSUB was the highest level of abstraction you could reach. None of this QBasic stuff.

It took me a long time before I could stop thinking about loops in terms of gotos, and be able to recognize things like e.g. the potential for parallelism/vectorization.

A formal CS education would have helped me (I got a degree in graphic design instead), but I think I would have been much better off learning about control constructs at first in their own right, and only later learning about how they could be implemented with goto, once I had learned to reason about them abstractly.

Coming at gotos from that direction, I might have been frustrated with their limitations, but I don't think I would have found them particularly hard to understand.

Regarding the paper, I'm not all that impressed. I agree with some things -- Dijkstra gets quoted a lot without real understanding, and everyone could stand exposure to systems programming, because they're going to run up against it at some point in their career whether they like it or not.

However, in my current programming job, I'm part of a team that ends up cleaning up other's failed projects a lot. Very often the deepest problems are due to inappropriate use of global or shared state (the next deepest tend to be due to poor error handling, and the use of long imperative-style blocks where code was cut-and-pasted instead of being refactored into common functions/objects -- the availability of gotos seem to exacerbate this last problem).

Frankly, I don't think the current crop of programmers is averse _enough_ to using global variables. The opposite extreme (overly avoiding global state) can be just as bad, but the resulting code is still significantly easier to reason about and clean up with a good refactoring tool.

Some global state is unavoidable (if nothing else the outside world is a global resource); the Platonic ideal (for non-systems-programming) is to have well-defined areas of code which are in contact with the "outside" world, where your IO, your external event sources, and your singletons go. Everything else need not have any global knowledge (e.g. the singleton you get via dependency injection just implements an interface you use; you needn't know it's a singleton).

I suppose Haskell's use of monads comes closest to this ideal, though I think they still haven't figured out all of the practical aspects yet.

Bad English?!?!?

[mlopes]

Shiver Me Timbers and Poke Me Other Eye Out! How would it handle this!?

Have Kylie stripped washed and brought to my tent

[Timesprout]

waiting...
waiting...
waiting...

Stupid computer doesn't do anything I tell it

I don't think so

[gowen]

Computer programming is second nature to most of the Slashdot crowd

Spoken like a man who's never looked at SlashCode.

Congratulations to MIT!

[kraksmokr]

nouns become objects, verbs become functions

Congratulations!!!
You've invented Smalltalk!
Welcome to 1980!

the old is new again

[dubl-u]

While the logic of the researchers' interpreter tackles only about 20 percent of the problem of full natural language programming, it achieves about 80 percent of the perceived rewards.

Ah, this old thing again.

The hard part about programming isn't turning basic English text in to half-assed code. If it were, then Google have built their company on just-out-of-college scripters and Visual Basic.

[Liu says] "Many subjects immediately identified the simplistic interpretation of the interpreter, and wanted the opportunity to rephrase their original wording to fix the error."

Yes, regular English is insufficient for programming. If a tool like this becomes popular, you'll need still need a special class of people to figure out what is needed and to figure out how to phrase the desire in the precise way that makes this guy's interpreter actually do what they want.

In other words, he hasn't invented a way to eliminate programming or programmers. He's figured out a way to make a programming language that is slightly easier to learn at first. But because it's removed from what computers actually do, much harder to use for anything serious. The hard part about programming isn't the month you spend learning Java syntax, it's the many years you spend learning to write code well.

Their theory appears to be that this will make programming easier to learn. I wish them the best of luck in that goal, but having seen over the years a number of graphical and natural-language programming tools vanish without a trace, I'm not holding my breath.

Thanks a lot.

[CDarklock]

Now that I've seen that, I suddenly have to wrestle with the fundamental insanity of having FOND MEMORIES about COBOL.

Why couldn't you have just left well enough alone, so I could keep happily despising it?

Next thing you know, I'll be pining away for OS/390 JCL.

Maybe Microsoft can help

[rdavidson3]

If Metafor cannot handle bad spelling or grammer, then maybe using MS Word to do it for you will help. This is ment to be a joke, and not insightful.

Re:Ebonics?

[Gzip Christ]

Hey brudda, how long beefo it be talkin ebonics yo?

There is already a programming language for programming in Ebonics. Be sure to check out some of the sample programs - they are true masterpieces.

Re:Other uses?

[AKAImBatman]

Just a thought, but wouldn't it be easier to produce a specialized programming language for this? The instructions could then be pivoted into either a readable recipe, or commands for a robotic machine. Something like this:

Ingredients
{
2 egg;
1 tsp vanilla;
4 cups flour;
}

Equipment
{
mixing bowl;
oven;
12x6 inch pan;
}

Directions
{
preheat oven 450 degrees farenheit;

break 2 egg into mixing bowl;
pour 1 tsp vanilla into mixing bowl;
pour 4 cups flour into mixing bowl;

mix mixing bowl;
pour mixing bowl into 12x6 inch pan;
place 12x6 inch pan into oven;

bake 15 minutes;
}

The associated paper is very weak

[Animats]

There's a paper linked from the article, but it's so short and weak that it's hard to tell if anything useful has been accomplished. In particular, it's not clear it if scales beyond the 25-line program shown. There are vague claims that it uses some database of "common sense" to help build the programs, but the paper shows no evidence of this.

This has been tried before, not successfully.

Importance of writing Good Requirements

[vivin]

What I've noticed a lot of times is that Engineers can't write documentation and requirements worth crap. Ok, so I shouldn't make such a blanket statement. Some engineers can write well, but most can't. I think this will do two things:

a) Help computer engineers describe their program's requirements better so others can follow them better.
b) Help beginning computer programmers make the connection between a natural language description of their program and the program itself. For example, this can help them understand concepts of OOP programming (nouns->objects, verbs->functions, adjectives->properties).

It's not true that programmers don't always write requirements. One of the classes I had to take in college dealt with the Software Engineering/Development Lifecycle. One of the things we had to do was to create a requirements specification for our program. We had to write it in a concise manner so as to map it to actual parts of our code. From the requirements document, we went to a UML software (Rational Rose) and from there, to the (skeleton) code. That's what this software does, except it encourages us to write proper descriptions in the beginning itself, and then maps that to skeleton code.

Natural Language to Logical Code - *gasps*

[cbelt3]

Yes, this is not a new concept. And yes, it's been on every science fiction writer's radarscope since the concept of a calculating machine was considered.
And it's still science fiction because:
- Language is situational, societal, and emotional
- Most people doing this sort of work communicate in English. So they assume English is a good place to start from. Unfortunately, it's one seriously illogical language to start from.
There have been attempts to create 'natural language' programming languages. And in the main they HAVE been successful. Sure, they are inefficient. But so is human communication.
Every psuedo-code compiler / interpreter that I've ever seen (since the 1970's) has simply been a programming language. Sure, maybe they're a little nicer to look at, but they will always fail the Turing test.
Want TRUE natural language programming ?
Develop a computer that works linguistically, not logically.

the trick

[mschoolbus]

The trick is to not have morons write the requirements OR code the actual software..

Its amazing how much this helps.

What about the other way around

[El Cabri]

Firstly, people for whom programming is too complicated should not code at all. We need less programmers building better code, not more programmers adding to the crap heap that the software legacy is as of today.

Secondly, I think that what is needed is the other way around : automated analysis of code and production of natural language reports that designers could browse more easily than the code itself looking for bugs or designing extensions and additionnal feature. They would then intervene directly on the code itself.
Sort of a souped up version of Knuth's literate programming, only with a much more radical transformation of the code for its vizualisation, bringing up the essential and critical aspects.

Think of how a reasonably complicated mathematical proof, say within the formal set theory, would look like in a math paper or book meant to be read. Compare with how it would be coded in a theorem prover. Different. Yet the former can be automatically generated from the later.

Hinderance, not a help

[Toby The Economist]

The key to high quality software is controlling the complexity in the inter-function domain; the ordering of and the relationships between functions.

Converting natural language to software does NOT address this problem. Natural languages are not expressive or fluent at rigiourously addressing complexity issues. Rather, formal methods address this problem; even weak formal methods such as state machines produce enourmous benefits to code quality, since they force the author to consider all possible outcomes from all function calls and at the same time, by rigiously, logically and consistently exposing the behaviour of the program, permit far easier code modification by later authors.

--
Toby

Re:Hello World in COBOL here...

[DoctorPepper]

I still prefer 8086 Assembler:

; Hello World program

ORG 100H

; Jump to start:
JMP START

; Data:
msg DB 13, 10, 'Hello, World', 13, 10

; Load address of msg to DX register:
START: LEA DX, msg

; Print using DOS interrupt:
MOV AH, 9
INT 21h

; Exit to operating system:
MOV AH, 4Ch
INT 21h

I call BS

[DarthStrydre]

Writing HTML is not programming. Drawing a stick figure with a smiley face is not art.

You are trying to imply that an artist should be able to write the next vector raytracing engine for HalfLife 3 with no knowledge of calculus. I claim BS. This is like giving the typical slashdotter with no art experience a contract to make a painting styled after a Rembrandt. "Its real simple! you just dip the paint brush in the paint, and drag across the paper"

In game development, there is a need for REAL programmers, REAL artists, and REAL musicians. Some people can pull off being two of these well enough, or even all three, but generally this is not the case.

Computer science is a science, mainly by the definition of "Methodological activity, discipline, or study".

Games are a work of art as much as a program. If you swap the personnel of the art department with the gaming engine department, the game will look like Duke Nukem Forever, and, uh... never mind.

Personally, the best programmers I know have graduated with degrees in electrical or computer engineering, not ComSci. ComSci folks seem to be too focused in the software realm. Yeah, this seems stereotypical, but based on observation. YMMV.

- Strydre

Re:I call BS

[Peyna]

Your points have merit, but what about average Joe that just needs some simple program or script and doesn't want to spend a few hours figuring out the syntax for it?

Everyone here seems to be quick to assume that the goal of a natural language like this is to be able to take the place of complex programs and what not. I see it more as a way for the average user to make on-the-fly programs for certain specific functions. The life and death stuff can come later, but for now, assuming this natural language stuff works out decently, if Joe is sitting in front of his computer and he wants to quickly do some calculations or compare some data, he won't have to search through hundreds of shareware or freeware sites, he can simply tell his computer "Create a program which does x y and x" and it will do it for him. It doesn't need to be 100% perfect; it doesn't need to be foolproof, it just needs to work well enough to get the job done for him.

Everyone here just seems drawn to the extreme examples where the applicability of such a system seems outrageous, but for everyday applications, it could be a very useful tool.

Code Complete

[simpl3x]

Is this perhaps an extreme example of building code from language, which is perhaps notoriously sloppy? I just gave my son an old copy of Code Complete so that he could learn to go from what he wants to do to code, all while developing documented code. He is in the introductory C++ programming class. He has a professor asking him to draw flow charts.

Taco has a point

[stinerman]

Update For for the dupe. Not going well. Appreciate all the hate mail. Really encourages improvement.

Unless you have an '*' next to your name, you don't pay for slashdot other than the electricity to run your box. Don't give me the "but the ads are there" tripe either. I know most of you either use Adblock or ignore them anyway.

The source is available. Start your own site.

Re:Taco has a point

[hackstraw]

Unless you have an '*' next to your name, you don't pay for slashdot other than the electricity to run your box. Don't give me the "but the ads are there" tripe either. I know most of you either use Adblock or ignore them anyway.

I don't see your '*', but a registered user and evan an AC adds traffic and credibility to the site. I don't know the numbers of subscribers, but I doubt /. would at all be the same if only subscribers were allowed to the site, or if it would exist at all. Also, I would assume that /. gets paid the same regardless of people using adblockers or whatever (or they should demand the same). Magazine ads pay a rate given the size, placement, and according the the volume of sales of the magazine. The same is for TV, radio, and newspapers. I've never heard of a TV, radio, newspaper, or any advertiser supported medium failing financially because people weren't "looking at the ads". Hopefully advertisers will realize that aside from a low cost quick fix gimic (also the ads for those gimics immediately stop when sales get below some threshold), an ad is best at promoting product awareness and a positive feeling towards a company and its products. I have never heard of someone up and trading in their car at 8pm at night and buying a new one because of an ad on TV. However, if its time to buy a car, the attitude towards a particular brand of car and the reputation of the manufacturer via ads and seeing similar cars on the road and people's feedback can increase sales. I'm beginning to think that the self delusion of sales people and their BS are wearing off on marketers to the point that marketers think they are salesman and are getting some kind of direct commission of a sale from advertising. Sorry, your only a marketer. Sales is a different job.

The source is available. Start your own site.

So true. But /. is currently a staple because of its userbase and its longevity on the net. I've been reading since it was "chips and dips" or whatever in Taco's dorm room when he was in school. Slashdot is aggressively indexed by google and is a good site _because of its users_ and its notoriety. The code is good, and it is available, but I know of no other even miner website of interest that uses slashcode. Sometimes I wish there were a more mature version of slashdot or at least a way to filter besides friends and foes for a more informed crowd vs the college kid that knows everything because he is a college kid that knows everything.

Update

[Espectr0]

Update For for the dupe. Not going well. Appreciate all the hate mail. Really encourages improvement.

Ah, yes! Duping words next to each other, that is the new fad. Because duping articles is so yesterday's news

Poor Taco

[p3d0]

Update For for the dupe. Not going well. Appreciate all the hate mail. Really encourages improvement.

All together now: "Aaawwwwwwwww".

I've never been one to complain about dupes. I figure I already get way more than I pay for from this site (which is zero). But if people are frustrated about dupes, maybe it's because it's an exceedingly simple problem to solve, and the Slashdot editors give every appearance of not bothering to lift a finger to solve it.

Re:Poor Taco

[kjamez]

or rather than complain about the dupes, keep scrolling down to the next headline. I didn't catch the origional article because i do things like go out in public and bathe, so i for one am thankful i got to read it. i miss quite a few articles in fact, and it's really not the end of the world. if i should happen to notice a dupe, i calmly keep scrolling thinking in my head "that sounds familiar, not of interest to me... " really, you all should try it rather than wasting extra keystrokes to complain about some free service.

Cooking for Engineers

[Dlugar]

I prefer the format used by Cooking for Engineers.

SQL

[TimeTraveler1884]

I would definately be skeptical with such technologies. SQL was an attempt to make database queries close to natural language. In my opinion, SQL is the most difficult language to do complex tasks with. True that it may be, SQL was originally designed for queries not stored procedures and such. The fact is that need was there and SQL had to try and support it.

The inherit problem with using a natural language, or something similar to a natural language for programming is that computers need exacting commands. While natural languages are more expressive, formal programming laguages are precise.

Which is the whole reason why there are often bugs. Computers are not smart, they can not guess what a user wants. They can only do exactly what a user specifies, whether it's right or wrong.

I mean, look at all the misunderstandings that occur between people. (Most) humans have a very sophisticated brain with a portion devoted to language. And still, we get things wrong very often when understanding others.

My point is I don't think there will be a replacement anytime soon for formal programming laguages. I know that is not what this tool is trying to do, but I think it's value is novel at best. There is a long way to go before someone can speak into a microphone and a computer can make the assumptions necessary to peform a task with a reasonable degree of success.

So?

[elucido]

Since when did every artist have to draw realistic artwork? Some artists draw anime, some artists draw comics, and some artists do draw stick figures and it is art to a lot of people. Unless you are going to program the space shuttle or the new unmanned probe, you don't need calculus. I've never used calculus in any of my code, not even once. Sure if you need to do realistic modeling of physics for your rocket, you'll need calculus, but unless you are going to be a rocket scientist why should we require all programmers get the training and education of a rocket scientist and then expect to be able to say "Well we need millions of programmers!". You cannot have millions of rocket scientists, you can have millions of good programmers. Do we really need a new game engine for every game? Can we reuse one good engine made by one rocket scientist over and over again? In art you'd reuse, in science you'd keep reinventing the wheel over and over again. Which is more efficient? Open source is art, and in art you don't need to re-invent the wheel, its all about the expression of the code not the calculus, not the science, the expression. If you are working for the government on some top secret mission critical project or if you are working for NASA then I can understand why you'd need calculus and math. If you are going to get a degree in calculus and math just so you can sit in a cube and write simple C programs all day, you wasted your time learning bullshit you'll never use, and the school has filtered out millions of coders who may be able to write great code for portable mp3 players or great applications for windows but who may not have the skill level to write the code for the new smart bomb or unmanned drone technology. Just because I cannot write code for advanced robotics or aerospace does not mean I cannot write basic applications, and thats what most people need. Most of us are using basic applications and most applications which are profitable don't require any calculus or math at all to write. Look at the code to Enlightenment, theres no calculus in it. Look at the code to Gnutella, no calculus, so tell me how a calculus programmer is more valueable to the economy than an artist programmer when most of the good programmers arent made by the calculus programmers? Napster was designed by an artist, not a NASA scientist. When was the last time a NASA scientist designed anything for the masses?

Re: Hate Mail

[zuvembi]

Well, nothing else seems to improve their editing style, grammar or general editing skills, so I really don't see why they don't expect hate mail.

It certainly would help if there was some transparency in their processes.

Time flies like an arrow

[Viking Coder]

When a Harvard natural language parser was given the phrase "Time flies like an arrow," in the 1960s it identified the following five parse trees in reponse.

1) Time proceeds as quickly as an arrow proceeds.
2) Measure the speed of flies in the same way that you measure the speed of an arrow.
3) Measure the speed of flies in the same way that an arrow measures the speed of flies.
4) Measure the speed of flies that resemble an arrow.
5) Flies of a particular kind, i.e. time-flies, are fond of an arrow.

I would guess the source code for those five different interpretations would be, well, different. (The fifth one is my favorite.)

About your update, Taco

[festers]

Update For for the dupe. Not going well. Appreciate all the hate mail. Really encourages improvement.

Taco, you asshole, you've been duping stories for years. You've known about them and yet you've done nothing to fix the problem. Don't pull this sentimental BS about not "encouraging" improvement. If the fact that if Slashdot is your creation, and is your job, isn't enough "encouragement" for you to fix the problem of dupes, I don't think anything will be. From all appearances, it looks like you've given up on /. years ago.

Re:About your update, Taco

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Maybe he could just tell us what does encourage improvement. Sending fan mail every time a story that isn't a dupe is posted?

Re:About your update, Taco

[Tim C]

Seems to me that a slashdot employee has one or more of four duties:

1) pick stories to post
2) sell advertising
3) maintain the servers
4) design and implement additions, bug fixes, etc

Now, I'm not a subscriber, but I don't see much in the way of 4), even for features that the readership is crying out for, or that make financial sense for slashdot (such as moving to CSS for layout). I thought that /. got most of its advertising through the OSDN network, so I'd imagine that 2) is more or less minimal (and with /.'s fame, shouldn't be too hard anyway). That leaves 3) and 1). I have no idea about the time requirements of 3), but I can imagine that it might keep a couple of people busy full time.

That seems to me to leave an awful lot of time left over for 1), picking stories to post. And yet, it seems like every day or two there is a dupe, every week or so there is a downright inaccurate (or even lying) summary or headline posted, and every month or so something that's accurately summarised, but the source is just plain made up or wrong.

I know that the FAQ states that the editors don't check the stories for factual correctness, but Taco (et al) I ask you this: what do you do all day?

Dupe checking is a not a technical problem.

[Inoshiro]

"Update For for the dupe. Not going well. Appreciate all the hate mail. Really encourages improvement."

At LWE in January, 2001, at a conference on Slashcode, someone asked us at Newsforge how our site had so few dupes compared to Slashdot. There were two reasons:
1) We had a smaller audience of people to see the dupes we did accidently post.
2) We searched our archives before posting any story. We searched by story URL, by story keyword. We also generally skimmed the site when we weren't working to be aware of what was being posted.

Clearly, #1 is something Slashdot doesn't have working in its immediate favour, but #2 is something that shouldn't be too hard. Zonk, Timothy, Cliff, Simonker, etc, don't post dupes nearly as frequently as CmdrTaco. Hemos doesn't post often, but he also seems to be pretty dupey (understandable as he's not really associated with /. anymore, and wouldn't be familiar with what's been posted).

The worst example is something like the PSP dupe story: Taco didn't even check out the games section, which had that story right at the top! A simple search for "PSP" and "Browser" would've shown it even if he never reads sections.

CmdrTaco doesn't read his own site. What does this tell you about how he feels about it?

I don't read Kuro5hin much anymore for the same reason. Complaining about dupes will just drive him further away, even though he still has to work on it by contract.

Re:Dupe checking is a not a technical problem.

[festers]

CmdrTaco doesn't read his own site. What does this tell you about how he feels about it?

Yes, that's been pretty obvious for the last couple years.

I don't read Kuro5hin much anymore for the same reason. Complaining about dupes will just drive him further away, even though he still has to work on it by contract.

You say that like it would be a bad thing. Maybe it's time he lost the presence, admit that's he's been burned out for years, and handed over the "reigns" to someone who cares enough about Slashdot to make the changes that are sorely needed. No one expects him to work at /. forever. If you can't find any pride in a job well done, maybe it's time to find another job...

Re:Dupe checking is a not a technical problem.

[festers]

Sorry to reply again, I remembered something right after I hit the submit button. In August of 2001 I emailed Rob Malda and asked him if he still cared about Slashdot. There was an article that sparked a lot of criticism, and CmdrTaco's response was "Eh, we'll get over it." Here are some of those links:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=21076&cid=2233 142

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=21076&cid=2233 751

It's kind of depressing to see that these issues keep getting rehashed year after year.

Use cases are deceptive

[crovira]

Its possible to construct perfectly correct use cases for an elevator which strands everybody on the roof.

Its also possible to construct use cases which don't make any sense (by not requiring the holes in the floors.)

Re:Use cases are deceptive

[merlin_jim]

Yeah I've had similar complaints about Use Cases. My biggest complaint is the typical round-pegs-in-square-holes of "describing what the user's experience should be does not come close to describing what the system should do"

In our practice we bridge that gap through requirements and logical design. It's inelegant and I don't like it, but when you're a consulting firm sometimes it's more important to be able to say that you use industry standard practices than it is to have the absolutely ideal solution.

I mean your homebrew project documentation standard might be really good. It might be the best ever invented. In fact, it might be so great that any programmer that looks at it can intuitively tell that it is superior.

The problem is that my clients are not programmers. My client's are almost universally unqualified to make any decisions about the fitness of development standards. If they were qualified to do that, they would either be developing internally or hiring contractors, not consultants. So using a standard that a third party has said is a good standard carries a lot of value over and above that of the standard itself sometimes...

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. But computer science isn't (necessarily) about programming. If you want to program, learn to program. If you want to know how programming languages work, and why they work that way, do computer science.

Graphics is a big field of computer science, and you cannot understand graphics algorithms without calculus, complex numbers, and algebra. If you can't do the maths, you're stuck writing 2D scrollers. The 1% of programmers who actually use that "useless" maths are the ones writing the game engines.

Computer science is indeed a science (arguably a branch of mathematics). Programming may or may not be an art, but it is firmly grounded in science.

Oh, and point-and-click game creation has been done several times. It was shit.

It's actually sorta important!

[SPYvSPY]

It really bugs me that /. editors treat dupes as a sort of charming fact of life, as if dupes are among those imperfections that make life worth living. Dupes suck, if for no other reason, because they fork discussion, confuse the archive and make searches less precise.

It's especially annoying when the dupe article proclaims that the /. crowd is able to code by second nature. How f-ing hard is it to have a dupe checker (even a simple on like what FortKnox is proposing). Why is it that a website that proclaims itself the bastion of all things FOSS has languished in mediocrity while thousands of competent coders are practically begging to write this feature into the site's backend? Of course, nothing will come of this, except more shoulder-shrugging and gee whiz, golly nonsense. I'm not trying to flame, but this sort of unprofessional, "friendly fuckup" attitude is what holds the public image of FOSS back.

Re:It's actually sorta important!

[Elwood P Dowd]

Why is it that a website that proclaims itself the bastion of all things FOSS has languished in mediocrity while thousands of competent coders are practically begging to write this feature into the site's backend?

We don't have to beg. We can just submit a patch to slashcode.

Re:It's actually sorta important!

[dmd]

The point is that such patches have been submitted, by dozens of people - people who are very talented, and who have a great deal of experience running and modifying Slash.

Slashdot is not interested in applying these patches, because dupes mean more angry posts, and angry posts mean more pageloads, and more pageloads mean more ads served.

Re:It's actually sorta important!

[A beautiful mind]

Dear CmdrTaco!

Please state your requirements about a dupe checker, between realistic boundaries.
Things like - integration into the accepting stories interface seamlessly, spamassassin style dupe detector with a point based system, or even coding bayesian algorithms - are possible.

I'm willing to (help to) code it. With two conditions. You'll apply it and use it. If this happens i'm predicting a serious decline in dupe stories and posts.

If you fail to do this or you're not interested in this offer, then STOP being pissed, put up with the hate mail, the accusations about ad revenues, and use the bloody search function.

Just to make sure this offer reaches you i'm going to mail it to you, and continue to do so - in regular periods - until i get some kind of reply, either a yay or a nay.

Yours, a beautiful mind

NO NO NO!

[RobertKozak]

In addition to helping programmers visualize their program better, I think it also promotes writing concise (and therefore) requirements and descriptions.

Nope!.

We don't need a way to transform natural language to program... we need a way to take a program code and produce natural langauge.

I don't know any developer that actually likes writing documentation.

Extending the analogy...

[benhocking]

and it should be made impossible for anyone untrained (or out of practice) in languages that meet your standard of snobbishness

Definitely, at least when it comes to business apps.

But not all code is written for business apps. What about scientists who understand logic fairly well, but who have difficulty in C or C++? (There are a surprising number of such people.)

Would you trust a surgeon who's 15 years out-of-date to operate on you?

Would you prevent a mother with no medical training to put a band-aid on her son's skinned knee? Sure, a trained doctor would know more about exactly how much (if any!) antibiotics to apply to the wound before applying the bandage, but surely you agree that the mother should be forced to pay his fees for this fairly trivial service?

I agree that this might not be for everyone or every project, and this particular instantiation might not even be for anyone or any project, but surely you must understand the importance of allowing the casual/hobbyist programmer to increase the tools in his toolbox!

Dijkstra said it best...

[period3]

...in his paper on the "Foolishness of Natural Language":

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.

Instead of regarding the obligation to use formal symbols as a burden, we should regard the convenience of using them as a privilege: thanks to them, school children can learn to do what in earlier days only genius could achieve.

When all is said and told, the "naturalness" with which we use our native tongues boils down to the ease with which we can use them for making statements the nonsense of which is not obvious.

Lazy admins

[DogDude]

No, an url checker isn't needed. They need to actually do their fucking jobs. Hell, I just read the site, and I know when a story is a dupe, as do hundreds of other readers. For a few of these guys, their ONLY JOB is to maintain the site. If they can't recognize when a story is a duplicate, they aren't doing their job. It shouldn't require an URL checker. These guys should get off their lazy asses. The problem is that some of us just keep coming back, giving them more pageviews, etc. If people got really sick of it and just came to /. less, maybe management would wake up and can these guys posting the stories. Sure, I know they started it, but that doesn't mean they're inherently more competent than anybody else.

Re:Use enums instead

[Tim C]

Java has enums as of 1.5 (or 5.0 if you're Sun's marketing dept). For previous releases, something like this should work:

public class Direction
{
public static final LEFT = new Direction(1);
public static final RIGHT = new Direction(2);
public static final UP = new Direction(3);
public static final DOWN = new Direction(4);

private int dir;

private Direction(int dir)
{
this.dir = dir;
}
}

Then the changeDirection method is

public void changeDirection(Direction dir)
{
this.direction = dir;
}

Natural languages are not enough

[EmbeddedJanitor]

It is easy to get trapped into thinking that we always used natural languages until we got to programming and therefore languages are the hurdle.

The use of special purpose languages is nothing new. They're used in mathematics, chemistry, music etc. ... pretty much anywhere where it is easier to use a special purpose language to express concepts than with a natural language. Sure there is a learning curve, but that is often the least of the hurdles in doing a reasonable job.

Take for example music: For the musically illiterate like myself, a music score means nothing. Yet, to someone who can read music it means a lot. I guess you could potentially write music in English: "Make a high pitches sound for a bit, then a lower pitched sound and then a highher pitched sound....". Reading that would be hell and it is imprecise as to what it means. The hard part to being competent at music is not how to read the score.

Likewise, computer languages are the least barrier to effective programming. What matters more are the concepts and being able to express them effectively. Sure, some languages are easier to use than others (eg. python might be simpler than C and just about everything is simpler then Brainfuck), but programming in a natural language would be damn difficult. We already have some simple programming languages like VBscripting and spread sheets for "soft tasks" like customising spreadsheets and wordporcessors etc.

Re:Use enums instead

[Coulson]

The pattern for enums in Java prior to 1.5 uses a singleton class to achieve the same effect.

class EDirection
{
public static final RIGHT = new EDirection();
public static final LEFT = new EDirection();
public static final UP = new EDirection();
public static final DOWN = new EDirection();

private EDirection() {} // private constructor
}

The private constructor ensures that only these 4 instances of this class will ever be instantiated.

It's all a matter of perspective...

[benhocking]

Hey, anyone is free to use it - all I'm saying is that it's going to create more bloated shit than anything else, and then who do you think is going to have to fix it (also explaining why it costs so much more, when it "can't be that hard, 'cause we were able to do stuff using Metafor")

Sounds like someone has a case of the Mondays. ;) Seriously, you appear to be speaking from your experience as someone who has to support idiots (AKA the general population). OTOH, I'm speaking from my experience in the sciences where the amount of time spent writing code is frequently larger than the amount of time spent running the code. In many instances (not all) bloat is less of a problem than time wasted tracking down the reasons behind a segfault. That's one reason why many scientists "code" in Mathematica and/or MATLAB. Again, I'm not saying that this particular solution is any good, just arguing for the value in making programming easier at the expense of making the programs less efficient in space/time.

People are going to use it for stuff it's NOT suitable for - that's human nature. Give someone a hammer, everything becomes a nail.

Give a mother a band-aid, and everything's a boo-boo. I still remember that time when I had my legs and arms separated from my body - blood was spurting everywhere! - and my mother was trying to fix it with a band-aid (well, four band-aids). Luckily, I finally convinced her that this was a job for a surgeon.

Clippy

[bar-agent]

Have Kylie stripped washed and brought to my tent

"It looks like you want to strip-wash Kylie. Now readying strip-washer, copper surfacer, and metal shearer. Thank you for using Metafor."

Bú shr -- Chinese ain't all that hard

[zooblethorpe]

Chinese is the hardest language in the world to learn.

By what metric? I've had a number of people tell me the same thing about English. As a native speaker of English, I've found Arabic much more daunting simply for the number of sounds that don't even approach anything in English, let alone the very complex grammar. Chinese by comparison was quite simple, with a grammar much closer to what I'd grown up with, and sounds I could at least approximate enough to be understood.

The problem with anyone saying "Language X is difficult" is that it has everything to do with where you're coming from. If you speak Samoan, then Mâori and possibly even Tagalog won't be too much of a stretch, as the languages are related. Coming from English and learning Mâori is a completely different ballgame.

By way of example, let's look at some simple sentences. "I am going to the store" in English works out to wö qù shângdiàn, literally "I go store" in Chinese. But try the same thing in Japanese, and it could come out umpteen different ways depending on who you're talking to. If you're amongst friends, you could say mise ni iku, lit. "store to go", with the subject of "I" only implied (implied subjects can make interpreting Japanese into English a real bitch, especially if you just missed the beginning of the conversation :). If you're talking to your boss, you might say watashi wa o-mise ni ikimasu, lit. "I (topic) (honorific)-store to go."

I'll be the first to admit this is a lame-ass example, but nonetheless, I hope it at least illuminates my main point -- what's difficult to learn depends on what you already know. :D

Cheers,