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Comment by rumcajz | Hacker News Reader

The investigation here goes in the opposite direction. It's not "wouldn't it be nice if computers understood natural language" but rather "wouldn't it be nice if people understood programming languages". The former is just silly. The latter is a call to create, in programming languages, constructs that can be parsed by the language machinery in our brains.

If the goal of programming languages was to instruct the computer, after all, we'd be all writing machine code.

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Humble submission to the cause - using "the" and "it" in a scripting language to avoid having to come up with variable names all the time.

Way back, I'd designed a scheme-based scripting language called "muSE" [1] in which we created specifications for video editing styles. I also toyed with the language. One such experiment was having a way to refer to values already computed using "the" and "it". [2]

[1] https://github.com/srikumarks/muSE [2] https://github.com/srikumarks/muSE/wiki/TheAndIt

edit: This project isn't maintained, but the latest version 711 still works on macosx [3]

[3] https://code.google.com/archive/p/muvee-symbolic-expressions...

There are already constructs like this. In all programming languages, you see variable names like data or result all over the place. Additionally, when using the python interpreter, there is a special variable _ for the last expression evaluated.

Either Kotlin or eXtend already have "it" for the default variable name of single-parameter lambdas.

"it" is common in that sense, but muse additionally models "the" as a function that turns verbs into nouns - like we do. For example,

    (open-file "blah" 'for-writing)
    (write (the open-file) "hello world")
    (close it)

    (length (list "milk" "pudding"))
    (print "number of items is " (the length))

Perl has this, in $_, the default/implicit argument.

This has already been done. It's known as Non-Aristotelian General Semantics. It's even possible to teach yourself how to speak this way. Intelligence agencies sometimes train operatives in it, because then the reports they make are more useful for intelligence analysis. http://esgs.free.fr/uk/art/sands.htm

The self-help pseudoscience? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_semantics

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