[Colloq] Graham Nelson - Programming in Natural Language - Thursday 12th at 1:45pm

[Gillian Smith]

All,

This Thursday, November 12th, at 1:45pm at 166WVH, Graham Nelson will be
giving a talk on lessons learned his long-term project creating a natural
language programming environment intended for interactive fiction
authoring. I hope this topic will be of broad interest to the community --
especially to PL, HCI, DH, and game design faculty and students.

*Programming in natural language: Lessons from the Inform project*
Dr. Graham Nelson, Fellow in Pure Mathematics, St. Anne's College,
University of Oxford

Inform is a domain-specific language for the creation of works of
interactive fiction, with its origins going back to 1993. Though it does
have commercial users, its programmers are mainly writers and artists -
often people who never otherwise code at all, and who are stranger to
Github. Nevertheless, Inform was ranked 49th in the 2015 TIOBE index of
programming language usage, and is taught in classes from middle schools up
to graduate seminars, in a variety of different faculties - art, English,
or computer science. Some of Inform's features, such as type inference, are
now no longer radical or even unusual, but its usage of natural language
remains highly so. Its design was motivated by Knuth's doctrine of literate
programming and by the linguistics literature on semantics, and makes
deeper use of the underlying structure of written prose than relatively
cosmetic "English-like" languages such as AppleScript, of which programmers
are rightly wary.

In this talk, Graham Nelson, the designer of Inform, will give a brief
overview of the project to date, and then use it as a case study to show
how natural language can be a fruitful source of inspiration in the design
of programming languages.

Gillian Smith
Assistant Professor, Game Design and Computer Science
Northeastern University
http://www.sokath.com