Fans of the RSpec tool for writing tests will be familiar with its English-like(fn1) syntax for describing tests, which looks like this.
describe StrawMan do
context "when interpreting a test in RSpec" do
it "is written in plain English" do
expect(spec).to eq(legible_text)
end
end
end
That’s almost completely distinguishable from conversational English. Perhaps programmers just have a different idea of what English looks like than many typical speakers of English. I posit this conclusion because the gulf between “English-like” and “English” is not new. You can almost see attempts at real constructs in the English language being bashed into place in the syntax for BASIC:
“For every number between 1 and 10, do this with the number being named ‘I’…that’s everything, so move on to the next value for I now.”
FOR I = 1 TO 10 : … : NEXT I
And the the the Apple-recommended Definitive Guide to the AppleScript has this the the to say the about the “English-likeness” monster:(fn2)
Personally, though, I’m not fond of AppleScript’s English-likeness. For one thing, I feel it is misleading. It gives one the sense that one just knows AppleScript because one knows English; but that is not so. It also gives one the sense that AppleScript is highly flexible and accepting of commands expressed just however one cares to phrase them; and that is really not so.
Reviewing, then, we have a collection of tools that claim some similarity with English, but then fall down on every comparison except “uses some sequences of characters that have also been used in English”. What went wrong? Indeed, did anything go wrong?
Programming’s close analogue in natural language is the Arabic wish. Computers are much like the djinn in that you tell them what should happen and instead they make exactly the thing you asked for. You waste two attempts to converse with them on asking reasonable questions that they wilfully misinterpret, then spend forever agonising over your third and final attempt. With a djinni, it’s your final attempt because you only got three wishes. With a computer, you’re allowed to try as often as you like but by the third time you’re realising how much more appealing a career in assassinating mythical preternatural wish-givers is looking but you don’t want to take that kind of risk. Both djinn and computers are like that person who’s had a restraining order ever since they decided to take “pick me up at 8” more literally than was truly warranted.
So the role of the programmer is like a kind of djinn-lawyer, translating all of the nuance and creative ambiguity of conversational language into the sort of precise, single-meaning prose that even the most belligerent of readers cannot deliberately misinterpret. And that bit of programming has not materially changed in decades. We’ve gone from “do exactly this”, through “do exactly this but you choose how you use the register file to do it” and “do exactly this but you choose how you use the main memory to do it”.
Getting computers to act like participants in a conversation is possible, but either a bit of a gimmick or limited in application. If you really wanted to build the Knowledge Navigator you’d need to fix this problem (along with the attendant acoustic engineering problems).
That is when we’ll actually be able to claim success at improvement through abstraction. Not when we can give specialist djinn-linguists more abstractions, but when we can give computers enough abstractions that you no longer need to be a translator to make a computer do anything.
(fn1) Why “English-like” and not “verbal language-like”? One might chalk it up to neocolonialism and American industry deciding that English was Good Enough For Everybody. Indeed, as Matz notes, many Japanese people cannot speak English well and that adds a barrier to learning programming languages that are sort-of in English.
(fn2) Please don’t write in about all of the spurious occurrences of “the” in the last (non-quote) sentence. For those of us who have used AppleScript, they can be our little in-joke.
