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Re:The Next 50 Years of Databases (2015) by The_rationalist on Monday November 11, 2019 @04:51PM (#21509274)
It's easy to produce unambiguous sentences in english.
Re:The Next 50 Years of Databases (2015) by transpostmeta on Monday November 11, 2019 @04:54PM (#21509295)
Then why aren't we programming in English? Why aren't we expressing mathematical expressions in English?
Re:The Next 50 Years of Databases (2015) by BOBOTWINSTON on Monday November 11, 2019 @05:30PM (#21509607)
Exactly.

My initial thought is highly specific human language is actually harder to write than most code, and always more verbose. Well written philosophy comes to mind.

I'd argue that this is part of the reason ORMs gained so much prominence. They solve the problem that SQL introduces by trying to emulate natural language. Most developers will gladly risk sacrificing some specificity of the query in exchange for reducing the verbosity of a SQL query. Obviously if the dev knows their ORM/SQL well, there is no lost precision.

Re:The Next 50 Years of Databases (2015) by cortesoft on Monday November 11, 2019 @05:28PM (#21509586)
I have to assume GP is being sarcastic
Re:The Next 50 Years of Databases (2015) by The_rationalist on Tuesday November 12, 2019 @01:11PM (#21516460)
Because nobody has been able to implement a computable implementation of English. It's an orthogonal issue to ambiguity.

I'm pretty sure controlled attempto English or lojban (zero ambiguity natural languages) have no computable implementations either.

Re:The Next 50 Years of Databases (2015) by squiggleblaz on Tuesday November 12, 2019 @08:17AM (#21513793)
tldr (or boring)? skip to the last pragraph.

"the product of pi and the square of r" is no less clear than the mathematical transcription of it.

3245 is perhaps English, but there's nothing wrong with "three thousand, two hundred and forty-five".

Some more examples taken from Wikipedia:

The sum of zero and zero. Five less than the product of eight and some value. Seven times the square of some value plus four times the aforesaid value minus ten.

I mean I could go on; these are either not ambiguous, or they're ambiguous only because of a lack of convention.

We don't do it because our attention span doesn't last long enough. We need to keep looking back at what we've already read to really understand what we're reading. Mathematical formulae give us the ability to do that quickly, since the graphical, multidimensional concise layout quickly allows us to find the place we're looking for.

Re:The Next 50 Years of Databases (2015) by discreteevent on Monday November 11, 2019 @05:22PM (#21509525)
About 25 years ago a mathematician I knew who didn't have much time for computers said to me: "In fairness there is one thing you can say for programming: It forces you to be precise"
Re:The Next 50 Years of Databases (2015) by binarytox1n on Monday November 11, 2019 @04:53PM (#21509288)
A good way to do it is to use a "structured" subset of the "language" for "querying" purposes.
Re:The Next 50 Years of Databases (2015) by apocalypstyx on Monday November 11, 2019 @08:51PM (#21510813)
My go-to (or goto, if you will) quote:

We are not here concerned with so-called computer 'languages', which resemble human languages (English, Sanskrit, Malayalam, Mandarin Chinese, Twi or Shoshone etc.) in some ways but are forever totally unlike human languages in that they do not grow out of the unconscious but directly out of consciousness. Computer language rules ('grammar') are stated first and thereafter used. The 'rules' of grammar in natural human languages are used first and can be abstracted from usage and stated explicitly in words only with difficulty and never completely.

--Walter Ong [Orality And Literacy]

Re:The Next 50 Years of Databases (2015) by unfunco on Monday November 11, 2019 @06:01PM (#21509853)
There's at least two different ways to read this comment.
Re:The Next 50 Years of Databases (2015) by vbezhenar on Monday November 11, 2019 @05:18PM (#21509487)
Like "select name from users where age > 15"?
Re:The Next 50 Years of Databases (2015) by jimbokun on Monday November 11, 2019 @05:23PM (#21509535)
You need to take an introductory natural language processing course.
Re:The Next 50 Years of Databases (2015) by The_rationalist on Tuesday November 12, 2019 @01:20PM (#21516545)
I'm an NLP scientist trying to implement a software that take english as input and parse it into a queryable data structure that has zero semantic loss. I'm aware more than anybody on this thread, of the challenges of coreference resolution, word sense disambiguation, semantic parsing, etc... I didn't say that usual language is free of ambiguity. I just said humans are perfectly able to output clear, unambiguous English in a systematic manner. I just needs a little more mental energy.
Re:The Next 50 Years of Databases (2015) by microcolonel on Monday November 11, 2019 @04:59PM (#21509339)
Unambiguous? Maybe. Specific enough to execute as programs? not nearly so much. I mean, humans regularly misinterpret verbal commands, and we're effectively the best thing at understanding and language that exists in nature. Half of the disagreements on HN result from misinterpretation of very specific, rather unambiguous statements.
Re:The Next 50 Years of Databases (2015) by blotter_paper on Monday November 11, 2019 @06:20PM (#21509996)
> Half of the disagreements on HN result from misinterpretation of very specific, rather unambiguous statements.

Disagree, it's almost certainly more or less than half; it's incredibly unlikely that these statements would account for exactly half of disagreements. Furthermore the statements in question are rather specific and very unambiguous, not the other way around.

Re:The Next 50 Years of Databases (2015) by microcolonel on Monday November 11, 2019 @06:22PM (#21510014)
> Furthermore the statements in question are rather specific and very unambiguous, not the other way around.

Or rather, the ambiguity is around how specific the statements are.

Re:The Next 50 Years of Databases (2015) by js8 on Monday November 11, 2019 @05:38PM (#21509686)
Anyone who thinks otherwise should be sentenced to death!