I think it would be useful for me to understand why you are interested in this question, and why you asked it on this forum. It feels like a relatively general technology question, and the answer seems pretty obviously “Yes” in a way that I don’t know how to really expand on.
You wrote things about the history of programming that everybodies knows and then ask a question that seems naive without explaining your motivations.
load basepay add overpay store grosspay feels to me much harder to understand then grossPay = basePay + overTimePay
One hypnothesis would be that you are someone without much experience in programming who thinks that ”load basepay add overpay store grosspay ” is easier.
Is that’s not the case that you are simply naive, it would help if you would write about how you imagine a ” more high-level ” programming language would work to let people engage with your ideas at a substantive level.
An intelligent compiler will ask for clarification whenever there’s an ambiguity and may suggest improved wordings to resolve the issue. Writing a program will end up being a conversation with an intelligent machine which anyone could handle even if they know nothing about programming—it will be a collaboration with an intelligent system which is in itself an expert programmer. The error messages will be comments and questions just like the ones you’d get if you were co-writing a program with a human programmer. (“When you say “print the result of that part”, do you mean this part [a section of the code is highlighted], and do you want it printed to the screen or the printer?”)
None of that will stop you putting in a line of C or any other programming language if you want to, but most of the work will simply be done in natural language, typically at a much higher level with the compiler working out how to carry out the tasks asked of it. The end user will also become a programmer, telling the machine how (s)he would prefer things to be done, and the machine will comply. That will rarely be done through anything other than natural language.
Programming languages will end up being increasingly high-level until they become identical to natural language. You will eventually be able to write all your programs in English, Portuguese, or any other natural language, although you will also be able to mix that with instructions of the kind used in today’s programming languages whenever you think that’s more efficient or clearer.
Where natural language is ambiguous, the machine can simply ask for clarification to make sure it has understood the instruction the right way, and if it hasn’t, it can help the programmer improve the wording of the instruction.
Please, see the Plain English Programming site so that you can see a language that looks close to natural language. That would let you see that using normal language would be a practical way to write code.
English is a language that’s subject to natural evolution over thousands of years over a domain of communicating information that’s not very abstract.
It would be very surprising if that process leads to a language that’s high-level in any meaningful sense of the term. English lacks basics like an unambigious or.
(“When you say “print the result of that part”, do you mean this part [a section of the code is highlighted], and do you want it printed to the screen or the printer?”)
That sounds like it would radically increase the work to write the “print” function in the first place if you have to think about all the possible meanings that someone might have in mind. That will make programming a lot harder.
Where natural language is ambiguous, the machine can simply ask for clarification to make sure it has understood the instruction the right way, and if it hasn’t, it can help the programmer improve the wording of the instruction.
The machine understanding the instruction isn’t the only problem that’s exists. Good code is written so that a human who reads the code understands what it does. Ambigious language that gets interpreted that way is going to be opague to the reader of the code which makes debugging harder.
Please, see the Plain English Programming site so that you can see a language that looks close to natural language. That would let you see that using normal language would be a practical way to write code.
To me it looks like it’s evidence of the opposite. The code is a lot harder to read then python code.
Hey, welcome to LessWrong.
I think it would be useful for me to understand why you are interested in this question, and why you asked it on this forum. It feels like a relatively general technology question, and the answer seems pretty obviously “Yes” in a way that I don’t know how to really expand on.
Hi habryka,
I asked it on this forum because I probably will create the programming of more high-level or human language level programming.
What is the correct forum to ask this question?
You wrote things about the history of programming that everybodies knows and then ask a question that seems naive without explaining your motivations.
load basepay add overpay store grosspayfeels to me much harder to understand thengrossPay = basePay + overTimePayOne hypnothesis would be that you are someone without much experience in programming who thinks that ”
load basepay add overpay store grosspay” is easier.Is that’s not the case that you are simply naive, it would help if you would write about how you imagine a ” more high-level ” programming language would work to let people engage with your ideas at a substantive level.
An intelligent compiler will ask for clarification whenever there’s an ambiguity and may suggest improved wordings to resolve the issue. Writing a program will end up being a conversation with an intelligent machine which anyone could handle even if they know nothing about programming—it will be a collaboration with an intelligent system which is in itself an expert programmer. The error messages will be comments and questions just like the ones you’d get if you were co-writing a program with a human programmer. (“When you say “print the result of that part”, do you mean this part [a section of the code is highlighted], and do you want it printed to the screen or the printer?”)
None of that will stop you putting in a line of C or any other programming language if you want to, but most of the work will simply be done in natural language, typically at a much higher level with the compiler working out how to carry out the tasks asked of it. The end user will also become a programmer, telling the machine how (s)he would prefer things to be done, and the machine will comply. That will rarely be done through anything other than natural language.
Programming languages will end up being increasingly high-level until they become identical to natural language. You will eventually be able to write all your programs in English, Portuguese, or any other natural language, although you will also be able to mix that with instructions of the kind used in today’s programming languages whenever you think that’s more efficient or clearer.
Where natural language is ambiguous, the machine can simply ask for clarification to make sure it has understood the instruction the right way, and if it hasn’t, it can help the programmer improve the wording of the instruction.
Please, see the Plain English Programming site so that you can see a language that looks close to natural language. That would let you see that using normal language would be a practical way to write code.
English is a language that’s subject to natural evolution over thousands of years over a domain of communicating information that’s not very abstract.
It would be very surprising if that process leads to a language that’s high-level in any meaningful sense of the term. English lacks basics like an unambigious or.
That sounds like it would radically increase the work to write the “print” function in the first place if you have to think about all the possible meanings that someone might have in mind. That will make programming a lot harder.
The machine understanding the instruction isn’t the only problem that’s exists. Good code is written so that a human who reads the code understands what it does. Ambigious language that gets interpreted that way is going to be opague to the reader of the code which makes debugging harder.
To me it looks like it’s evidence of the opposite. The code is a lot harder to read then python code.
Hi ChristianKl,
I probably will create the programming of more high-level or human language level programming because I want to facilitate the computer programming.
That sounds like I don’t understand the question.