Comparing natural and computer languages

[nancylebov]

http://ask.metafilter.com/97673/Computer-languages-considered-in-linguistic-contexts

is about what might be said about computer languages to people who are primarily interested in linguistics.

The comments include an essay by Djikstra which has two snarky gems....

They blamed the mechanical slave for its strict obedience with which it carried out its given instructions, even if a moment's thought would have revealed that those instructions contained an obvious mistake. "But a moment is a long time, and thought is a painful process." (A.E.Houseman).

****

It was a significant improvement that now many a silly mistake did result in an error message instead of in an erroneous answer. (And even this improvement wasn't universally appreciated: some people found error messages they couldn't ignore more annoying than wrong results, and, when judging the relative merits of programming languages, some still seem to equate "the ease of programming" with the ease of making undetected mistakes.)

and one dubious claim:

As a result of the educational trend away from intellectual discipline, the last decades have shown in the Western world a sharp decline of people's mastery of their own language: many people that by the standards of a previous generation should know better, are no longer able to use their native tongue effectively, even for purposes for which it is pretty adequate. (You have only to look at the indeed alarming amount of on close reading meaningless verbiage in scientific articles, technical reports, government publications etc.) This phenomenon --known as "The New Illiteracy"-- should discourage those believers in natural language programming that lack the technical insight needed to predict its failure.

For those of you who have a sufficiently long and attentive baseline, whether it's personal experience or through study, do you think people produce more nonsense than they used to, or is it just that the nonsense is more informal and untidy?

Comments

[malkingrey.livejournal.com]

There's more nonsense out there because there's more of everything out there, I'd say.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

do you think people produce more nonsense than they used to, or is it just that the nonsense is more informal and untidy?

I'm not sure. I do think there has been a tendency, in business, government and academia, to produce increasing amounts of gobbledygook. I'm not sure the causes are common though. In government I suspect it is mainly driven by a desire to mislead. There is a clear trend, starting with the Vietnam War, to use language designed to conceal what was really happening and why and present the whole thing in an essentially sanitised way. I think that has now become the normal modus operandi of governments.

In business and academia I suspect the desire to impress by sounding knowledgeable (or at least to conceal the essential vacuity of what is being proposed)is the driver. This clearly got into business via the business schools which teach little about business and a great deal about how to sound like a third rate academic. I frequently find myself in exchanges that go roughly:

Junior Consultant presents busy Powerpoint full of impressive sounding words

Me - Is what you are really trying to say {something very simple}?

JC - I suppose so

Me - Then why not say it that way?

JC - looks baffled. That's not what they teach at Harvard/Wharton/Chicago

[avram]

The trend goes back farther than the Vietnam War. Orwell noticed it happening back in the '40s.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

As always Orwell makes his points with economy and precision. I'll repeat the point I made recently in writing about Homage to Catalonia, he may just be the best modern English writer of non-fiction. Thanks for the pointer.

[chomiji]

It used to be that only a small proportion of the population was literate, and that producing written materials was a fairly arduous process.

Now, in a number of countries, the vast majority of the populace is literate, and it's no trouble at all the produce reams of written material, most of which is never reviewed before it becomes public.

So calling it "The New Illiteracy" is a vast oversimplification, IMO. More people are literate than ever before, but giving them literacy didn't make them good or even fair writers.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

While I'm always skeptical about studies comparing educated people to days of yore, I find myself nodding at this one. (Too many studies don't take into consideration that universal education is still a very, very new concept.)

I have noticed that professionals of all sorts who are under, say, forty, tend to make a lot of grammatical errors, and some of them are so consistent that I wonder if the language is going to change to reflect them. Mixing apostrophes with plurals (never getting the plural apostrophe right), using 'lay' for both 'lay' and 'lie' though the latter is not transitive, misuse of prepositions, and dangling modifiers as almost a stylistic choice (I think the influence there is commercials, with their clipped words, i.e. "As a parent, child safely is crucial." I don't think these people are stupid--most of them are smarter than I am--but I do think that when they were in school, language was not taught, it was sort of left to be absorbed by osmosis. And they didn't get enough exposure to good literature to absorb proper language by osmosis.

[inquisitiveravn.livejournal.com]

I may be weird in that I got thoroughly drilled on English grammar from second to ninth grade. Even then, I didn't understand the subjunctive mood until I took Spanish. English has almost completely lost the subjunctive, and it may be gone in another generation.

I do remember being very surprised to find out how many college level students had not been taught grammar when they encountered the subject in an intensive Russian class that I took one summer.

[madfilkentist]

One factor is that more garbage gets directly out to the public, with no editing process. This is the result of technology.

In addition, though, there's been an increasing tendency over the last few decades for people to take offense when their usage is corrected. The people who exemplify this trend don't consider it necessary to study grammar and usage; if they write it, it's their "personal expression" and nobody should object to its sloppiness.

(Double-checking this comment to avoid the corollary of Murphy's Law which says that every grammar rant must have a grammatical error.)

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Does sloppy usage reliably indicate unclear thought? Do the sorts of errors you're talking about generally impede communication?

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

Does sloppy usage reliably indicate unclear thought?

I don't think it necessarily indicates unclear thought but it certainly allows unclear thought to go undetected. It's nearly impossibly to write an unclear thought clearly but quite easy to make a pretty good idea look muddled.

Do the sorts of errors you're talking about generally impede communication?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and argue that grammatical errors, while annoying, do not often lead to confusion. What leads to confusion is lack of structure, logic and understanding of claim support. The Ancient Greeks, starting a tradition that lasted until quite recently, established a curriculum that taught logic before rhetoric. Bright lads those Greeks.

[avram]

Note that Dijkstra is writing from the Netherlands. I've no idea what grammatical trends are going on there.

On the matter of natural language programming, John Gurber wrote an essay a few years back, "The English-Likeness Monster", analyzing a very subtle bug in AppleScript, and then going on to argue that resemblance to English is a bad thing in a computer language.

[avram]

And of course, immediately after hitting "Submit", I noticed that I'd written "Gurber" instead of "Gruber".