On the foolishness of “natural language programming”

I really like this quote: > some still seem to equate "the ease of programming" with the ease of making undetected mistakes Conversely you could say that ease of programming is equal (or at least correlated) with ease of getting confidence of your programs correctness. On the wider subject of the essay, I do note that languages like APL that really embraced symbolics for expression do not seem to have gained much ground, and on the other hand languages that…

The hardest part about software always has been, and probably always be, getting humans to first know and then express exactly what they want. Natural human language allows for vague, abstract, and ambiguous expression (not to mention the euphemisms, exaggerations, half-truths and outright lies). Most people who have never written a computer program, have probably never even been through the experience of having to express exactly what they want someone or something else to do for them, in a specific…

IMO the argument is sound in one direction: the precision, structure, and unforgiving nature of programming languages is a feature rather than a bug. That said, I think this does not mean that there is no benefit to natural language interfaces to machines. I think he goes wrong here: > 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…

A moment isn't such a long time anymore, not for compute clusters anyway. If we don't keep trying to make AI, we're never gonna get there. I'm not saying data mining is AI. I'm saying human brains do data mining too, but differently, and figuring out how is what might come of all this. Wolfram-Alpha-style natural language programming actually isn't that bad because it's a dialogue. The thing tells you its assumptions, so you're back to formal representations you can…