Saturday, October 20, 2012

Programming Languages Should be Unnatural


I have always thought that the notion of making programming languages more like natural ones is absurd. Without a truly formidable amount of artificial intelligence, practical natural-like programming languages amount to eschewing symbols for words, which more adds inconvenience than clarity (I'm looking at you, Applescript). If anything, I feel natural languages should be made more like artificial ones than the other way around. In very technical disciplines, this is actually done after a fashion: they adopt a precise specialized jargon to help combat the inherent ambiguities and limited vocabularies of context dependent natural language.

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