Dr. Mario's 2nd 🧠

On the foolishness of natural language programming

3 min read

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In order to make machines significantly easier to use, it has been proposed (to try) to design machines that we could instruct in our native tongues. this would, admittedly, make the machines much more complicated, but, it was argued, by letting the machine carry a larger share of the burden, life would become easier for us. It sounds sensible provided you blame the obligation to use a formal symbolism as the source of your difficulties. But is the argument valid? I doubt. (View Highlight)

the choice of an interface is not just a division of (a fixed amount of) labour, because the work involved in co-operating and communicating across the interface has to be added. We know in the meantime —from sobering experience, I may add— that a change of interface can easily increase at both sides of the fence the amount of work to be done (even drastically so). Hence the increased preference for what are now called “narrow interfaces”. (View Highlight)

A short look at the history of mathematics shows how justified this challenge is. Greek mathematics got stuck because it remained a verbal, pictorial activity, Moslem “algebra”, after a timid attempt at symbolism, died when it returned to the rhetoric style, and the modern civilized world could only emerge —for better or for worse— when Western Europe could free itself from the fetters of medieval scholasticism —a vain attempt at verbal precision!— thanks to the carefully, or at least consciously designed formal symbolisms that we owe to people like Vieta, Descartes, Leibniz, and (later) Boole. (View Highlight)

The virtue of formal texts is that their manipulations, in order to be legitimate, need to satisfy only a few simple rules; they are, when you come to think of it, an amazingly effective tool for ruling out all sorts of nonsense that, when we use our native tongues, are almost impossible to avoid. (View Highlight)

Instead of regarding the obligation to use formal symbols as a burden, we should regard the convenience of using them as a privilege (View Highlight)

the “naturalness” with which we use our native tongues boils down to the ease with which we can use them for making statements the nonsense of which is not obvious. (View Highlight)

many people that by the standards of a previous generation should know better, are no longer able to use their native tongue effectively, even for purposes for which it is pretty adequate. (You have only to look at the indeed alarming amount of on close reading meaningless verbiage in scientific articles, technical reports, government publications etc.) This phenomenon —known as “The New Illiteracy”— should discourage those believers in natural language programming that lack the technical insight needed to predict its failure. (View Highlight)

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