alt Hacker NewsI don’t think you can do that. Or at least if you could, it would be an unintelligible version of English that would not seem much different from a programming language.
Replies
cortesoft • yesterday at 7:40 AM
I don't think it would be unintelligible.
It would be very verbose, yes, but not unintelligible.
valenterry • yesterday at 7:27 AM
Why not?
Here's a very simple algorithm: you tell the other person (in English) literally what key they have to press next. So you can easily have them write all the java code you want in a deterministic and reproducible way.
And yes, maybe that doesn't seem much different from a programming language which... is the point no? But it's still natural English.
I agree with your conclusion but I don't think it'd necessarily be unintelligible. I think you can describe a program unambiguously using everyday natural language, it'd just be tediously inefficient to interpret.
To make it sensible you'd end up standardising the way you say things: words, order, etc and probably add punctuation and formatting conventions to make it easier to read.
By then you're basically just at a verbose programming language, and the last step to an actual programming language is just dropping a few filler words here and there to make it more concise while preserving the meaning.