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Comment by jappgar | Hacker News Reader

No offense, but "natural language sucks" is the refuge of the illiterate logician.

Complex language is clearly superior in nature. We're now finding out that that is true in computation as well.

We are in fact finding out precisely why natural language sucks in real time, as we have all kinds of catastrophic errors with people who think this is finally the time for complex language to prevail over pesky nerd language. The only difference is that more people seem to prescribe to the "you're holding it wrong" handwave when said catastrophes are pointed out.

Plenty of catastrophes are available under pure logic as well. The only catastrophes they prevent are accidental ones.

Natural language can build civilization around "do unto others as you would have done unto you".

Logic cannot encode morality, precisely because it is unambiguous.

You are right, and that is precisely the issue. When complex logic fails, we don't usually blame the machine. When natural language fails, we as of late seem to be trying to anthropomorphize a machine that cannot be held accountable. As if understanding natural language suddenly means it understands morals.

I can appreciate your original point, but this degenerated into naivete. The is-ought problem exists in (and was formulated for) natural language, and ambiguous formal languages are childsplay. There are further problems (ignorance of the consequences of reality being finite, misunderstanding the operative layers of interpretation) but these two alone are disastrous by themselves. Don't mix up convention with implicit substance. There's a very basic philosophical lesson you're missing, and I'll let you in on the secret: The labels aren't actually descriptions of any property. The distinction is indoor baseball. Notations, syntax, semantics. What you want is signal, and you can transmit that any way you want. Writing and drawing were once the same thing. Still are.

I am not sure what your counterargument is. But in mathematics and computation, people have tried for at least 150 years to move away from natural language, and figure out stable foundations that can be externalized. I think there is a good reason for that - you save time correcting errors due to different interpretation.

Extraneous and ambiguous is superior? Or are you talking about hypothetical new spoken languages?

Yes. Ambiguity is a feature, not a bug.

Isn't code supposed to be exact? Pretty much the opposite of ambiguous.

I don't think it's a feature or a bug. It is an indicator of an extremely poor spec though.

Yes all of my the customers of my accounting software love the ambiguity of how it will react to them processing entries.

You’re not saying anything with substance, but I guess that’s not surprising given your stance on LLMs.

Well, almost all scientific domains have developed a form of structured and formal language, because natural language is too ambiguous. There's "code" everywhere, not just in programming.

No offense but you're just making statements without backing it up with anything. "Clearly superior", "finding out that is true"..

How are you going to prove what you said? Natural language is not enough for that purpose. You need formal logic, quantifications, specifications, the foundation of programming. Superior to what, and according to what metrics? What truth in computation are you talking about, and how can we know and confirm it? Not with natural language, but with numbers, mathematics, the building blocks of logic.

Superior just means "above" or "on top of". Natural animals don't communicate in logical terms, even if their dna is a logical sequence.

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