305b283f

I'll respond to your points, but was the ad-hominem really necessary?

In the end, natural language assumes a broad swath of "common sense" that computers do not have yet.

Absolutely. I'm not at all saying that we'd have had this last Tuesday if we'd just take our heads out of our asses - I'm saying it's something we should strive toward and not ignore.

Many of the problems arise in the ambiguity of the human-human communication.

Human-Human communication works, and works well - once again, we do it every single day, all the time.

Do we encounter problems with ambiguity? Sure. But they are by far the exception and not the norm. After all, forms get filled out, Driver's licenses get renewed, complicated Starbucks orders get filled - these common use cases work.

By contrast, have you ever had this fun experience with a terminal program?

quit

Unknown command: "quit"

exit

Unknown command: "exit"

shutdown

Unknown command: "shutdown"

or my favorite:

quit

Unknown command "quit." If you want to close the program, type "exit."

Simple English statements like these work extremely well in human-human communication and do not work hardly at all in human-computer communication. I'd just like us to get from A to B, that's all.

An error rate of 1/1,000 or so, with almost all of them being recoverable errors? I'll take that. :)

you want John Doe to delete something from the system? He might try to unplug the harddrive, maybe that's what he thinks "deleting" means.

Highly unlikely that someone familiar with the system (even in an informal way) would do this, for the same reason that you have no trouble understanding me when I say "fruit flies like a banana". Is there technically a chance that I mean "all pieces of fruit fly through the air in the same manner that a banana flies through the air"? Sure. But it's so ridiculously low that you simply ignore it and are willing to accept the infinitesimal risk of misunderstanding.

Should all programming or user interface work be done this way? Of course not. I'm just saying it would be a very effective level of abstraction for a great many use cases, in the same way that I don't need formal mathematical notation to write a Python statement to print "hello, world".

Of course, he formalism has to be there once you get down far enough, in the same way that showing Sharon how to do an account credit in the CRUD system means that you are altering neural structures with electric and chemical signals.

However, the person who trains Sharon doesn't need to know exactly what neurons to stimulate in Sharon's brain with exactly what voltage in order to teach her that system - the relatively lofty level of abstraction provided by English works just fine.

Of course you are technically correct, however I retreat back to my main point: we do this every day and it works just fine.

Certainly not perfectly of course, but go and ask people who use some sort of CRUD system that used to be manual what they like and what they dislike about the new system.

Likely very few of them will say it is easier to use than just asking Sharon in the next cubicle to verify something.

They will have some likes, sure - but they will be things like the almost infinitely increased speed or the fact that they can access the system 24/7 while Sharon needs to sleep and take a break to eat the occasional Ding-Dong, but the ease of use that comes with dealing with another human being is a sacrifice that they make for these benefits.

(or to put it the reverse way, imagine the same office and a new employee named Eliza comes in and behaves exactly like a computer, "only doing the things you tell her in a painfully literal way." How quick would you want to give her the boot?)

After all, when people want to be really precise, they use mathematical notation :)

Again, this is absolutely true. The problem is when you're dealing with a simple CRUD app for your insurance house or just copying files over to your iPod, you're not interested in being really precise - you're interested in the shortest path to get a relatively simple thing done.

If that path is blocked by the fact that you don't know the particular menu item, keyboard shortcut, or command switch for something that you can express in English without even thinking about it, then I regard that as a huge opportunity for technology in general and our industry in particular.

I think we are still a long way from understanding what really happens inside our brains.

Agreed 100% - I'm in no way saying that it's easy or will be done in our lifetime or the next 10 lifetimes - just that it's not impossible because we're not magic and we do it every damn day.

About telling a computer what to do: They don't 'do' anything. They run programs. (Free after Weizenbaum)

What I want is (to reference an example in another comment) to go to a command line and type "Copy the report to the share" and (if I'm on a linux box) have my computer translate that to "cp /path/to/report.pdf /path/to/share/" without my ever having to know what it's doing behind the scenes.

Whatever categorical bucket someone wants to put that in doesn't matter to me whatsoever - all I'm saying is that's what I want to see, and that's what I think we should work toward.

Agreed.

It seems an appalling number of people agree with Dijkstra here - "we not only don't need natural language, we don't even want it."

I'm sorry, but if I can express to a human being a set of directions to fill out a form in a minute or two and expressing that to a computer takes much longer and is more error-prone, that is an inefficiency in software development which it is extremely desirable to address.

There is nothing magical about human brains that would make them theoretically impossible to express in software in such a way that we can give a program natural language directions, and the fact that so many people want to dismiss this endeavor out of hand is ridiculous to me.

This should be our holy grail, something to strive toward, not something to ignore.

In fact I would suggest that it will most likely be the only way out of the mess of such a wide variety of software standards (ever have fun moving your things to a new system and having to re-learn many things just because you changed PC or phone operating systems?), whereas natural language is a standard we already have and works fine.

This way you essentially wouldn't need to learn a new set of incantations - just tell the damn thing what you want the damn thing to do, dammit.