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Re:On the foolishness of “natural language programming” (1979) by kortex on Saturday September 19, 2020 @10:16PM (#24531530)
I wish it were (more) acceptable to use made up words, like medicine does. Once you know the base morphemes in greek/latin, it's really easy to decode medical jargon. You'd need to augment the list with a bunch of technical terms of course.

It would be cool to have a tiny vocab (a la Toki Pona) of say 256 single-syllable morphemes of 1-2 consonants and 1-2 vowels.

SimpleBeanFactoryAwareAspectInstance -> Haplefaesthamon

Of course this is probably appealing to conlangers and language nerds, and horrifying to everyone else.

Re:On the foolishness of “natural language programming” (1979) by grey-area on Sunday September 20, 2020 @01:57AM (#24532166)
Maybe the long name is a clue this monstrosity simply shouldn't exist?

The problem is not the number of letters used, but the number of ideas attached to one identifier.

Re:On the foolishness of “natural language programming” (1979) by Kim_Bruning on Sunday September 20, 2020 @06:25AM (#24533116)
Actually making compound words works in many natural languages by itself. It's just obscured in English due to its nature as a near-creole: it has lots of loan-words all over the place, so it's less obvious how you can mix-and-match. (And it's less obvious how the loan words themselves might have been mixed and matched in the first place)

In Greek, Latin, French it's much easier to make compound words already.

Dutch does it a bit too, and German is quite famous for it. People actually make up words on the spot, and other people can easily infer the meaning.

I learned this the hard way while training a natural language "AI". People just do it in their day-to-day use of those languages.

In any case, I don't think you need to make up new morphemes for English, it has too many already from all the languages it's been borrowing from. Drawing from the extant pool would be quite adequate for me!

Re:On the foolishness of “natural language programming” (1979) by bitwize on Sunday September 20, 2020 @02:53AM (#24532351)
> It would be cool to have a tiny vocab (a la Toki Pona) of say 256 single-syllable morphemes of 1-2 consonants and 1-2 vowels.

I'm sure the Urbit people will be by to explain that this is being worked on for Hoon, and email me now and I'll get you set up with a planet.

Re:On the foolishness of “natural language programming” (1979) by Baeocystin on Saturday September 19, 2020 @11:43PM (#24531737)
My father was a linguist. He one time suggested that I program in Lojban, as the logical aspect of it would be much easier to understand than the symbol-soup he perceived in what I was using.

He meant well.