An interesting idea but - there is almost always a better user interface than English (or any other language used for inter-human communication).<p>The example in the post is a case in point - it is way simpler to just grab the little margin widget and set it where you want it. Way simpler than a conversation with the software anyway.<p>Imagine: "Hey computer set the edge bit erm, margin, yeah thats it, OK set the margin to two inches. Wow, that's a bit wide - maybe a bit less. Let's try one and a half inches - woops maybe I meant centimetres all along".
Greg Little's homepage has links to two papers and his Master's thesis which provides the actual technical information: <a href="http://glittle.org/" rel="nofollow">http://glittle.org/</a><p>They refer to it there as "keyword programming." I was very skeptical when I went to their description page, but after giving a cursory look at their actual work, I'm interested. It looks like they use context in the program and heuristics as guides through the search space to come up with a good guess.<p>There's a lot of comments here that are - rightly - skeptical, but before saying "it can't be done," check out what they actually did. It gets use one step closer to "Computer, Earl Grey, hot."
I wonder if the authors have tried programming with AppleScript? John Gruber has a good article exploring the problem with "English-like" programming (<a href="http://daringfireball.net/2005/09/englishlikeness_monster" rel="nofollow">http://daringfireball.net/2005/09/englishlikeness_monster</a>).
"Syntax-Free Programming" is as much an oxymoron as "Language-less language". It may be graphical; it may be less rigid (what they're talking about here), but it's there. I would recommend that they look into Simonyi's work on Intentional Programming.<p>I've spent a long time on this idea and came up with something that follows an MVC pattern, so that I can have Syntax X, and you Syntax Y, and your modifications are seen as in Syntax X to me, my modifications seen as Syntax Y to you. The language is the model and the syntax (graphical, textual, etc.) is just the view/controller. (But it was kind of a nightmare: to get it to work I had to create an OS from scratch using the principles, for example.)<p>Again, "syntax-free programming" is a really poor choice of words for what they're working on.
<p><pre><code> Please launch iTunes and Firefox unless Safari is installed.
</code></pre>
That's why non-syntactic programming doesn't work. It isn't ambiguous to you because you're human and realize that both Firefox and Safari are web browsers and why would someone not want to launch iTunes if Safari was installed. However, it can be interpreted both ways without such knowledge.<p>The problem isn't syntax. The problem is the logic computers need. We're loose with our language logic. We use modifiers that could modify a host of things that we only glean from what would be natural based on the content. Computers can't understand content in that way.
Syntax is usually not much of a worry to me, compared to other problems (how will I lock this object for access from other threads? what should be the interface for such and such callback?) It doesn't take long after starting to program in a language for syntax to become second nature, and often it can express something more concisely, or even elegantly than plain english (point-free haskell is an art... when it's not overdone, anyway).<p>Being able to find commands in the API is nice, but that's basically intellisense or hyperspec made automatic.
not completely related but isn't the lack of rigidity/strictness the reason for all the problems related to HTML today? To me this will open another pandora's box of long term headaches