Are coders worth it?

Re:Are coders worth it? by bennyg on Thursday June 06, 2013 @02:39PM (#5834342)

That sounds awesome. I've dreamed of a context-aware, natural language programming language:

Change value of potatoes to 10. (potatoes = 10).

Make potatoes equal 10. (potatoes = 10).

Give every person at the dinner table a potato. (for x = 0; x < dinnerTable.count; x++ {dinnerTable[x].potatoes += 1})

Etcetera.

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Re:Are coders worth it? by nekopa on Thursday June 06, 2013 @03:02PM (#5834489)

But think about it this way:

So, I want to check my diary and see what I need to do today. Anything really important should flash, so I know I need to take care of that. But, I know that my boss is waiting for me to finish that puff piece on our new acquisition, so double flash that. Also let me know I need to buy cat food. Stat.

Make a program that can parse that piece of text and you're onto a winner. (I'm trying)

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Re:Are coders worth it? by boomlinde on Friday June 07, 2013 @11:14AM (#5839357)

It's a neat idea, but I don't think it's particularly useful. Natural language is an unnecessary abstraction that will not help you solve the problem, unless the problem in itself is about grasping the syntactic peculiarities of your language of choice. From your examples, it seems like it would just be a very verbose way of defining a solution to a problem in basically the same way you do in any imperative language.

Syntax should be the least of concerns, and even if it wasn't, involving the subtleties and ambiguities of english language wouldn't be the solution.

EDIT: I don't mean to say that a natural language programming language couldn't be useful, but I'm arguing that it won't be unless you can use natural language to move closer to the problem domain, rather than abstracting the solution description further.

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Re:Are coders worth it? by mbrock on Thursday June 06, 2013 @04:53PM (#5835105)

Check out Inform.

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