> Natural language is a bad enough way to communicate with people
If it was bad, it wouldn't have become the way to communicate with people in every culture on the planet. Don't forget "natural language" can include body language, as well as words, grammar, idioms, stresses, pause, and intonations.
> there are several movies based on what can happen when two people have a conversation but have a context mismatch
Matching context using protocols such as small talk before a main topic of conversation is also part of natural language. Many of us who work on computers don't learn these other aspects of natural language very well, and tend to project this limited command of natural language onto computer languages.
>If it was bad, it wouldn't have become the way to communicate with people in every culture on the planet.
We have nothing better, but it is not the only way we communicate. Mathmatics made a whole other language to communicate with because spoken language wasn't effective enough.
Further, natural language is useful among people because we can work out meanings, fill in implicit statements closely enough, have experience on what certain phrases mean and so on. Even with every tool we have, we often still get it wrong. So if it takes so much intelligence to be able to communicate with written language, why would anyone imagine it a good idea to expect computers to be able to do this too? A computer must explicitly be told what to do in every situation. Typically when we need to go into that level of detail with people we don't use natural language either. We generally demonstrate what must be done (e.g. youtube tutorials which often don't even have sound, etc.).
>Many of us who work on computers don't learn these other aspects of natural language very well, and tend to project this limited command of natural language onto computer languages.
Is that a rock thrown at me? I don't think I have a problem here. I'm just realistic about what language is good at. Natural language's value is that it can be very concise when everyone has the same context as you. With a computer this is never the case.
>If it was bad, it wouldn't have become the way to communicate with people in every culture on the planet.
That's because the vast majority of social situations are very tolerant of misunderstandings and have lots of redundancy/repetition to ensure that communication occurs successfully.
In cases where misunderstandings can be significant, we turn to more formal modes of communication. Scientific literature, technical manuals, and legal documents are all more stilted than regular prose for the simple reason that they need to clearly and unambiguously communicate their contents. Reader enjoyment is a secondary consideration.
Programming languages need to be even clearer than legal or technical documents, because they're being read by a machine rather than another person. As such, I see ambiguity in programming languages as even more of a sin than ambiguity in contracts and scientific papers.
If it was bad, it wouldn't have become the way to communicate with people in every culture on the planet. Don't forget "natural language" can include body language, as well as words, grammar, idioms, stresses, pause, and intonations.
> there are several movies based on what can happen when two people have a conversation but have a context mismatch
Matching context using protocols such as small talk before a main topic of conversation is also part of natural language. Many of us who work on computers don't learn these other aspects of natural language very well, and tend to project this limited command of natural language onto computer languages.