[HN Gopher] E.W.Dijkstra Archive: On the foolishness of "natural...
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E.W.Dijkstra Archive: On the foolishness of "natural language
programming"
Author : lelf
Score : 35 points
Date : 2020-09-19 19:39 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cs.utexas.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cs.utexas.edu)
| [deleted]
| pdfernhout wrote:
| Natural language is adapted for many tens of thousands of years
| to be used by groups of hunter/gatherers working together on a
| common task -- which also includes arguing about related things
| like assumptions and priorities. In that context, physically
| pointing or showing things is important ("put it _there_ "). As
| is also non-verbal feedback from expressions on people's faces or
| by where their eyes are looking. Also, people in the group can
| ask clarifying questions, like "What did you mean by X?" or "Can
| you be more specific?". Or the speaker can ask, "Did you
| understand what I said?" When people try to explain how to do a
| task without getting immediate feedback on how the receiver is
| understanding the communication, one can expect that natural
| language instructions will be missing critical information -- or
| may also specify unneeded extra information. Ever since I worked
| in the IBM Speech Research Group circa 2000, I have felt natural
| speech could be useful in programming -- but it will take a
| different perspective on how to use natural language as
| conversation and related creative experimentation to provide a
| different experience compared to what people are used to doing
| with conventional programming languages. It might be more akin to
| some aspects of pair programming perhaps.
|
| That said, a big feature of HyperTalk (used by HyperCard) was
| that is is closer to natural language than most programming
| languages. HyperTalk supported various alternate phrasings and
| also the use of the word "it". And the physical "card" metaphor
| provided an approachable metaphor for instructions about
| manipulating stacks. It is sad that Apple essentially killed off
| HyperCard for most users with various marketing decisions as it
| was an amazing platform that made programming approachable for
| many non-programmers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTalk
|
| And Inform7 as mentioned by someone else here is another example.
| Although Inform7 feels more about being read as natural language
| (when you write is within strict limits) than about being written
| flexibly as natural language.
| k__ wrote:
| _" Natural language is adapted for many tens of thousands of
| years to be used by groups of hunter/gatherers working together
| on a common task "_
|
| Is this the case?
|
| I don't know much about languages, but I can't even recognise
| earlier version of my native language from a few centuries ago.
| pdfernhout wrote:
| Thanks for the question (and indirectly an example of my main
| point on natural language as dialog). Sorry for not being
| clearer. I did not mean the words themselves. I mean the
| neural circuitry in humans for language.
|
| Also related: "Researcher Responds to Arguments Over His
| Theory of Arguing"
| https://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/researcher-
| res... "The main idea of the "argumentative theory of
| reasoning," put forward by Dan Sperber and myself is that the
| function of human reasoning -- why it evolved -- is to
| improve communication by allowing people to debate with each
| other: to produce and evaluate arguments during a discussion.
| This contrasts with the standard view of reasoning --
| apparently shared by quite a few of the readers -- that
| reasoning evolved in order to further individual reasoning:
| to make better decisions, to plan ahead, to get better
| beliefs, etc. ... We do not claim that reasoning has nothing
| to do with the truth. We claim that reasoning did not evolve
| to allow the lone reasoner to find the truth. We think it
| evolved to argue. But arguing is not only about trying to
| convince other people; it's also about listening to their
| arguments. So reasoning is two-sided. On the one hand, it is
| used to produce arguments. Here its goal is to convince
| people. Accordingly, it displays a strong confirmation bias
| -- what people see as the "rhetoric" side of reasoning. On
| the other hand, reasoning is also used to evaluate arguments.
| Here its goal is to tease out good arguments from bad ones so
| as to accept warranted conclusions and, if things go well,
| get better beliefs and make better decisions in the end."
| mhh__ wrote:
| In the same sense that the data structures are generally more
| important than the code, I think the "quality"-axis is around
| some combination strictness, semantics, and safety rather than
| the syntax.
|
| I may be outspoken in saying this, but I try to avoid Python
| wherever possible because - although I like the syntax - I am
| quite worried about having to trust other humans to enforce
| semantics rather than a compiler. If something ill-formed is in
| my program, I want to know about it before it starts running
| rather than 5 hours into execution. I have the same opinion of C,
| too.
|
| In an ideal world where we could all sit around and plan our
| programs from scratch, I would love to program in a pure
| functional style - but this isn't really possible half the time:
| I try to minimize as much global (or even local) mutable state as
| possible, especially now that progress in execution speed is
| incremental and the growth is probably going to be in our ability
| to use concurrent execution.
|
| Python is supposed to faster to get going, and maybe it is
| compared to C++, but even then C++ can express things that can
| only be done with writing tests in Python (for free). There is a
| trade-off in that I've spent years honing my skills now, but is
| it that hard (It's quite hard to be holistic when teaching
| programming, I'm slightly glad I figured most of it out myself)
| amelius wrote:
| Maybe natural language should become more like programming
| languages instead of the other way around. I suppose this could
| be especially useful in e.g. legal circles, where ambiguities are
| problematic.
| exdsq wrote:
| Lojban is a good example of this.
| Animats wrote:
| Ah, that's Dijkstra - programming is hard and programmers should
| _suffer_.
|
| He's right, though. Natural language is for communicating, not
| describing. When we really need to describe something detailed,
| we need either visuals or formalism.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Ironically, natural language makes finding documentation
| extremely difficult. If you're SQL problem revolves around the
| keywords "USING", "HAVING", or "WHERE", Bing is going to really
| struggle to find you results. If, instead, you're looking for
| strcpy, nearly every result will be relevant with little effort.
| drunkpotato wrote:
| I just went to bing.com and typed `sql using` into the search
| box. The results were relevant. I tried again with google and
| duckduckgo. Same. I wonder if perhaps you are overestimating
| the difficulty here.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Easy searches like that will work but you never need help on
| the easy queries. It's in the complex queries with keywords
| modifying keywords where the issue arises.
| jasperry wrote:
| I feel Dijkstra kind of undermines himself with the curmudgeonly
| "kids these days" remark at the end. Still, he makes a very
| strong historical argument for a broader point than the title
| suggests--for not being in such a hurry to get rid of formal
| notation. For some of us, that's preaching to the choir, but I
| feel like it could be well aimed today at those who think "IT"
| has no need for "Computer Science".
| coldtea wrote:
| > _I feel Dijkstra kind of undermines himself with the
| curmudgeonly "kids these days" remark at the end_
|
| Not necessarily. The idea that "kids" across generations are
| always either the same or improving across times and cultural
| changes is an even bigger cliche than "kids these days".
|
| Dijkstra in this, as is made clear from the context, case
| doesn't even talk about kids (people) in general, but about a
| specific subset: educated people.
|
| So, while more people get an education than ever, and you could
| find total illiterates in greater masses in e.g. 1900 than when
| Dijkstra wrote this, there's also a decline in many aspects
| between a university graduate of 1950 and a graduate of say
| 2020. Part of this is because in the 1950 university degrees
| where rarer, and thus more demanding and elite.
|
| But it can be true even for graduates from colleges that remain
| highly selective (Yale/Harvard 1950 vs Yale/Harvard 2020).
|
| One example might be a CS degree with C/Assembly or Lisp and
| SICP vs one with some Java "market-driven" introductions to
| programming... One makes computer scientists, the other is a
| glorified job training program...
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I wouldn't be so sure that that 1950 university degrees where
| more demanding. More rare and elite, definitely. But it
| wasn't really intelligence or drive that made sure you could
| go to university. It was whether your social standing allowed
| it.
| [deleted]
| astrowar wrote:
| inform 7 is an example of programming in natural language. It
| specializes in solving a single problem and being more of a set
| of statements than a place to write algorithms. Even so,
| ambiguity problems in writing are complex and require constant
| consultations with the documentation to know which sentence is
| valid for which situation.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Inform 7 is a natural language DSL for a rather narrow domain
| (interactive fiction). Dijkstra's discussion in this letter is
| probably from the general (at the time and recurring)
| discussion of general purpose natural language programming.
| That is an important distinction to keep in mind.
| zokier wrote:
| 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 are
| light on syntax and use more verbiage like for example Python
| have been massively popular.
|
| Overall I think the essay also relates to the common idea that
| naming things is difficult. The names we give our elements of
| code imbue the "all sorts of nonsense that, when we use our
| native tongues, are almost impossible to avoid". And how many
| bugs stem from people making assumptions about things based on
| their names because the sort of linguistic ambiguity etc that
| Dijkstra is talking about here?
| sigsergv wrote:
| Natural language is so opaque term. You need to establish context
| (vocabulary, relations, rules) if you want to pass some
| information to another person. The same phrase could have
| different meanings in different context. And from this point
| programming language is just another context.
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