Hacker News Reader

Comment by w_t_payne | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what programming languages look like? I'd guess a lot like natural language?

They say their results from Wikipedia data were influenced by XML tags, so programming languages might look a lot like their Wikipedia data.

For reasons like this, I don't trust their empirical results at all.

Not quite, but as the paper says:

    Corollary:  No  probabilistic  regular  grammar
    exhibits criticality.

    In the next section, we will show that this statement is
    not true for context-free grammars (CFGs).

That is, there exists CFGs that exhibit criticality. Programming languages are often parsed by CFGs, so it's likely that some programming languages exhibit the same criticality structure as natural languages.

I think that means only that programs written in a language described by a CFG could exhibit "criticality", not that they will. "Exhibiting criticality" is a property of a distribution (e.g. a corpus of human-written programs or an algorithm for generating programs), not of a grammar, IIUC.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com