Comment by oarsinsync | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oarsinsync | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> If your code has wrong syntax it doesn't compile. If wrong grammar you can get very wrong results.

In both cases, when you get it that wrong that your meaning doesn’t come across correctly, it’ll usually get pointed out to you, either by the compiler or the person you’re talking to, so you can go back and try again.

Eventually, you’ve potentially gotten it right when the compiler stops throwing errors or the person you’re speaking to understands. Unfortunately, in both cases you may still not end up with the desired outcome as your compiler is “stupid” and cannot understand intent, only what you’ve written. Similarly, but different, the human you’re speaking to may bore of your broken language eventually and just move on.

There’s no perfect system for everyone, but it never hurts to remember the saying: perfect is the enemy of good enough. It doesn’t matter if your language skills are perfect, just that they’re good enough to convey your meaning effectively for the environment you’re in.

In my experience, when you're an adult, people are too polite/reserved/caring/uncaring to correct spoken language errors for you. They'll be much more likely to infer what you meant silently, and react as if you'd spoken the sentence perfectly. In that sense, people are much more like a web browser in how they process your language than a compiler.

They aren't just polite, it's exhausting to play the pedantic compiler and generally degenerates or requires an agreement with an equivalent exchange.

Perhaps having an automatic compiler changes our perception much as an auto-tickling device doesn't work, but surely early levels of math and languages have similar learning paths.

Apologies, I realise the way I wrote this wasn’t clear enough:

> Eventually, you’ve potentially gotten it right when ... the person you’re speaking to understands

I can see that I wrote poorly here myself, and here you (and child) are correctly correcting me, while simultaneously arguing against that happening, which is kinda ironic!

What I failed to adequately express was that human languages are a lot more forgiving of errors, and as long as the message is understood, you’ve gotten it “right”

Which is fine, you can learn a lot by immersion when you hear other native speakers talk. I only ask a person to repeat when I don't understand or if it's unclear and I need to be sure about something. Not breaking the flow of conversation is much more important to me

I disagree with this. How many people do you know that have been speaking English for years but still miss articles ('a', 'the')? It is still very easy to understand these people. We could say the same about tones, diction, and accents. Plenty of people that don't sound native can easily be understood. You'd actually be surprised how much you can butcher a language and still be able to communicate (this is really helpful to language learners!). There's so much fuzziness here that it I haven't seen any compiler (plugin, shell, etc) anywhere near this level of fuzziness.

Tldr: Compilers you need to be fairly precise, natural languages you barely need to be in the ball park.

The important part for the fuzzy understanding is shared context. This is what lets humans who have no languages in common communicate basic things in ad-hoc sign language bits as well.

And if the context fails, things can go just as badly as with computers, in the short run. In the longer run, people notice that something went wrong and are likely to go back to an earlier point and try to clarify, whereas computer systems are not great at it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com