alt Hacker NewsHis grammar classification is really useful for formal grammars of formal languages. Like what computers and programming languages do.
It's of rather limited use for natural languages.
Replies
ogogmad • yesterday at 10:00 AM
Don't you think people would have figured it out by themselves the moment programmers started writing parsers? I'm not sure his contribution was particularly needed.
"BNF itself emerged when John Backus, a programming language designer at IBM, proposed a metalanguage of metalinguistic formulas ... Whether Backus was directly influenced by Chomsky's work is uncertain."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backus%E2%80%93Naur_form
I'm not sure it required Chomsky's work.