brian will . net

The naturalistic (language) fallacy

Why natural language in programming languages is a fool’s game.

1. The main purpose of a formal language is that it is free of the ambiguities found in natural human languages.
2. While naturalistic language may give off signals of familiarity and thereby boost a programming language’s approachability, the gain is more than offset by the increased complexity which naturalism introduces, complexity which learners will very quickly be confronted with. Naturalism acts as a mask for language complexity, not a substitute for it.
3. I for one am skeptical of the ‘cult of smartness’ found in programming culture, but even I will say that a learner new to programming just isn’t going to cut it if they can’t adapt to the concept of a formal language: if you’re hanging on to those bits of typical programming languages that happen to be English-like (e.g. control words like ‘if-else’), then you just aren’t getting it.
4. The usual bits of English-like syntax found in our languages are often more misleading than helpful.

This last point can be illustrated with the keyword ‘while’. The keyword ‘while’ obviously was introduced with a sentence in mind like, ‘Do this stuff while this condition remains true.’ Problem is, this sentence, as understood by the typical English speaker who is not already versed in a C-like language, would not convey what ‘while’ actually does; the sentence only sounds good enough as a description of ‘while’ to programmers already familiar with the ‘while’ construct.

A more accurate sentence for describing ‘while’ would be, ‘If this condition is true, do this stuff, otherwise move on; after every time you do the stuff, test the condition again, doing the stuff if true or moving on, ad infinitum.’ Notice the absence of the word ‘while’. Also notice that the sentence which the originators of ‘while’ did have in mind is not what a newbie to the language is going to see—they will just see the word ‘while’.

Not only is ‘while’ not really evocative of its function, it easily misleads: a very common misconception learners get is that a ‘while’ loop will end the moment the condition is made untrue inside the loop rather than when the block completes and the condition tested again; many learners likely get this misconception because it is consistent with the sentence, ‘Do this stuff while this condition remains true.’ Learners would be better served were ‘while’ instead arbitrarily named ‘friedchicken’ (perhaps ‘kfc’ to save on typing).

Now, of course, not all English-like elements are so poorly chosen—’if’ is pretty sensibly named, though I would have gone with ‘otherwise’ in place of ‘else’—but the acceptable cases are few enough that one can hardly say there is much benefit in attempting to conform to an ideal of naturalism. You’ll likely just do more harm than good.