Comment by cortesoft
18 days ago
> PureScript is a programming language. English is not.
Why can’t English be a programming language? You would absolutely be able to describe a program in English well enough that it would unambiguously be able to instruct a person on the exact program to write. If it can do that, why couldn’t it be used to tell a computer exactly what program to write?
> Why can’t English be a programming language? You would absolutely be able to describe a program in English well enough that it would unambiguously be able to instruct a person on the exact program to write
Various attempt has been made. We got Cobol, Basic, SQL,… Programming language needs to be formal and English is not that.
I don’t think you can do that. Or at least if you could, it would be an unintelligible version of English that would not seem much different from a programming language.
I agree with your conclusion but I don't think it'd necessarily be unintelligible. I think you can describe a program unambiguously using everyday natural language, it'd just be tediously inefficient to interpret.
To make it sensible you'd end up standardising the way you say things: words, order, etc and probably add punctuation and formatting conventions to make it easier to read.
By then you're basically just at a verbose programming language, and the last step to an actual programming language is just dropping a few filler words here and there to make it more concise while preserving the meaning.
I think so too.
However I think there is a misunderstanding between being "deterministic" and "unambiguous". Even C is an ambiguous programming language" but it is "deterministic" in that it behaves in the same ambiguous/undefined way under the same conditions.
The same can be achieved with LLMs too. They are "more" ambiguous of course and if someone doesn't want that, then they have to resort to exactly what you just described. But that was not the point that I was making.
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I don't think it would be unintelligible.
It would be very verbose, yes, but not unintelligible.
Why not?
Here's a very simple algorithm: you tell the other person (in English) literally what key they have to press next. So you can easily have them write all the java code you want in a deterministic and reproducible way.
And yes, maybe that doesn't seem much different from a programming language which... is the point no? But it's still natural English.
No. Natural language is vague, ambiguous and indirect.
Watch these poor children struggle with writing instructions for making a sandwich:
https://youtu.be/FN2RM-CHkuI
English can be ambiguous. Programming languages like C or Java cannot
English CAN be ambiguous, but it doesn't have to be.
Think about it. Human beings are able to work out ambiguity when it arrises between people with enough time and dedication, and how do they do it? They use English (or another equivalent human language). With enough back and forth, clarifying questions, or enough specificity in the words you choose, you can resolve any ambiguity.
Or, think about it this way. In order for the ambiguity to be a problem, there would have to exist an ambiguity that could not be removed with more English words. Can you think of any example of ambiguous language, where you are unable to describe and eliminate the ambiguity only using English words?
Human beings are able to work out the ambiguity because a lot of meaning is carried in shared context, which in turn arises out of cultural grounding. That achieves disambiguation, but only in a limited sense. If humans could perfectly disambiguate, you wouldn't have people having disputes among otherwise loving spouses and friends, arising out of merely misunderstanding what the other person said.
Programming languages are written to eliminate that ambiguity because you don't want your bank server to make a payment because it misinterpreted ambiguous language in the same way that you might misinterpret your spouse's remarks.
Can that ambiguity be resolved with more English words? Maybe. But that would require humans to be perfect communicators, which is not that easy because again, if it were possible, humans would have learnt to first communicate perfectly with the people closest to them.
COBOL was designed under the same principles: a simple, unambiguous English like language that works for computers.
C can absolutely be ambiguous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undefined_behavior