The naturalness of software

Abstract

Of all that we humans do, it is our use of language that most sets us apart from animals. Honed by millions of years of cultural and biological evolution, language is a natural, ordinary, even instinctive part of everyday life [2]. However much we authors may labor to fashion lucid prose for this learned tome, we speak and write spontaneously and freely in daily life: most of what we say is simple, repetitive, and effortless. This quotidian aspect of natural, human linguistic behavior, together with large online corpora of utterances, modern computing resources, and statistical innovations, has triggered a revolution in natural language processing, whose fruits we enjoy every day in the form of speech recognition and automated language translation. If one were to view programming as a speech act, is it driven by the “language instinct”? Do we program as we speak? Is our code largely simple, repetitive, and predictable? Is code natural?.