Is there a natural language web application framework?

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+3 Q:

Is there a natural language web application framework?

Is there a natural language web application framework? Maybe something like http://inform7.com ?

Maybe something like:

Make a website called My_homepage at my_homepage.com
The homepage for My_homepage is called mainpage
mainpage has a title of 'Home'
mainpage has text at the top saying 'My homepage'

+3 A:

If you mean "Is there a framework for developing web application in natural language?" - no there isn't.

And not only for web application. The natural language is way too complicated to be understand with no duplication of meanings. The syntax is not strictly defined and so on ... In fact we people have difficult times understanding each other :)

You cannot write a formal grammar on natural language that fits in hierarchy of Chomsky. Even the C/C++ grammar is very complicated. (it's Context-sensitive I believe).

Actually I think that not the programming languages are difficult to understand in fact. The algorithms and the concept of programming, the semantic that those programming languages have is more important.

anthares 2010-02-14 08:30:14

But you can write a web application without knowing C?

Zubair 2010-02-14 08:36:38

Of course ... I just give an example how complicated is natural language ...

anthares 2010-02-14 08:42:53

Couldn't a formalised subset of natural language be used, something which is easy to read?

Zubair 2010-02-14 08:48:59

@Zubair Even just that has been tried before. Being "readable by managers" was the argument for COBOL, and AppleScript tries to be readable by non-programmers too. But programs are harder to write in both these languages, and programmers tend not to like them.

Pascal Cuoq 2010-02-14 08:57:55

@Pascal: right idea, but COBOL is no harder to use than any other language of its time. The issue with COBOL is that its time is so far past.

John Saunders 2010-02-14 08:59:19

By subset you should not only limit the words that are used. You should reduce the number of rules that construct valid constructions. In fact ... most of the programming languages are formalized subset of natural languages. Take Visual Basic for example, it's very near to the real language (not so near to developers, though).

anthares 2010-02-14 09:00:27

I didn't know about Cobol being human readable. Do you know any good web links I could use to read up on this, as maybe Cobol will be my answer. Thanks

Zubair 2010-02-14 09:11:32

And I'm quite happy with old languages, Erlang for example. Its the new languages I worry about as stable and battle tested languages are more for me.

Zubair 2010-02-14 09:13:23

@John Some LISPers might disagree, but then some non-LISPers might disagree with the LISPers :)

Pascal Cuoq 2010-02-14 10:00:15

@Zubair If you are going to try COBOL as a result of my comment, it means I have completely failed to get my point across. Is THIS really what you want? http://www.infm.ulst.ac.uk/~ted1/html/cobol.htm

Pascal Cuoq 2010-02-14 10:08:19

I looked at the Cobol example you showed me and I know what you mean. I guess its a classic case of someone "marketing" cobol as "readable by managers" but not being the case in real life. I agree with you :)

Zubair 2010-02-14 12:40:16

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Is there a natural language web application framework?

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