Super-high-level programming languages

Not many posts recently as Alex is visiting. We were discussing programming languages, which divide between those focused on performance (C++, Go) and those focused on the problem domain (Java, Scala).

I floated Prolog past him, but with his engineering head on he wasn't that interested. The tutorial programs were 'hard to understand' and in any case 'could be coded much more efficiently in a procedural language such as Java'.

OK, I gave up on that but it did make me think: what would be a language at a much higher level of abstraction even than Prolog?

Richard Montague

There's a way of thinking about this as a logician, where you focus on different kinds of semantic models: those of higher-order logics, modal logics, type systems .. but I don't really want to go there. Richard Montague's 'throw the kitchen sink at it' logic for natural language is a kind of reductio ad absurdum for that kind of approach. You rapidly lose any computational capability.

Our intuitive idea of the inadequacy of current programming language expressivity derives from a comparison with natural language. What an advance it would be (we think) if we could engage with a computer system the way we today talk to the (human) analyst.

English as a super-high-level programming language?

For me the extra dimensions of natural language include the management of agency (hence speech acts) and context - the presumption of a detailed and extensive shared culture to make sense of implicit referents.

In the end it depends on what we think we're programming. If it's the behaviour of a non-intentional black box (every business system to-date) then a more-or-less souped-up predicate calculus specification language (which is adequately executable) will be optimal: a Prolog-variant.

If our target system is an intentional system, indeed a second-order intentional system - one which treats other systems such as ourselves as intentional systems - then the 'programming language' to engineer such systems will incorporate those additional capabilities we find in natural language.

Today's AI engineering community will hiss at this point: we don't program any more - our systems learn!

Don't worry, that pendulum will be swinging back soon enough. I expect legislation in due course that new AI systems will have to attend school.