alt Hacker NewsI suspect this is why formal languages exist; as a sieve to keep the hordes of fools at bay, and a system for turning bullshit into parse errors.
We are undoing much of this progress by now insisting everything be expressed in natural language for a machine to translate on our behalf, like a tour guide.
The natives will continue to speak amongst themselves in their mother tongue.
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The corpo-speak sounds like mostly way to communicate contentious things in nice way, everything done to not sound negative or aggresive, while knowing (or hoping) that other side gets the message.
It is awfully unproductive way to do it but I'm sure HR approves.
Which is precisely why proper scammers, not to say "top" management, is excellent at spotting keywords, or even better shibboleh, and using them. If they must they'll even learn and adopt new keywords from HBR or whatever trendy management publication can help them look the par.
>a sieve to keep the hordes of fools at bay
Corporate speak as a signalling mechanism is only effective among the "clueless" in the Gervais model. If any CEO tried to talk 1:1 to a competent board member that way, they would lose all credibility. Once you've operated at a certain level you get it
>a system for turning bullshit into parse errors.
This is the (cynical version of) the framing I tend to hold about corporate speak. It's deliberately vague as a way to navigate uncertainty while still projecting authority and avoiding accountability in settings like a town hall, large meeting etc. Which is not to be read as a necessarily "bad" thing. No one wants a micromanaging CEO. They have to set vision and direction while leaving space for it top be executed by all the layers under them
> formal languages exist; as [...] a system for turning bullshit into parse errors
that's a very neat way to put it!
Maybe controversial, but I believe a lot of OOP/Clean Code patterns are the software equivalent of corporate BS.
But if someone says something like "synergizing paradigms", isn't that essentially a parse error to any normal person?
You don't need formal language (though formal languages can serve that purpose). You just need to listen like a normal human being rather than like a corporate suit, and that kind of language is just incomprehensible - a parse error. You have to work at it to make sense of that kind of language. And why I took from your first paragraph is permission to treat it as a parse error instead of as some valid message that I needed to decode.
> a system for turning bullshit into parse errors
Because when I go to view an old website from the 90s that's missing a closing tag for something, I don't want the content-- I want a big red XML parse error with a gigantic horizontal scrollbar.
The history of programmers blithely attempting to add new parsing errors to existing problems instead of obviating them is long and storied. Your sentence would look right at home as part of the BS generated for the test subjects from the article.
That's not quite accurate. Formal languages (which have an old pedigree) can be useful for clarification and inference, but they can also obfuscate the truth, and what's more, subvert it. Every logical formalism necessarily presupposes some metaphysics, and if the metaphysics is bad, or you fail to recognize the effective bounds of that formalism, you can fall into mechanically generated bullshit. Modern predicate logic suffers from known paradoxes and permits nonsensical and vacuous inferences (like those caused by material implication). More subtle effects are expressed in, for example, the problem of bare particulars.
Formalism is a product of prior (semantic) reasoning that isn't formal. And because formalism is syntactic, not only can you still jam your semantic nonsense through it (through incoherent subjects and predicates, for example), but the formalism, stripped of semantics, can itself allow for nonsense. So formalism can actually aid and abet bad reasoning. The danger, of course, is the mistaken notion that "formal = rigorous".
Formalism is also highly impractical and tedious in many circumstances, and it can depart from human reasoning as expressed in the grammar of natural language enough to be practically inscrutable. There is no reason why natural language cannot be clear and well-written. So, I'm afraid you're barking up the wrong tree here.
The problem with LLMs isn't that they're not "formal". It's because they're statistical machines, not reasoning machines, yet many people treat them like magical oracles.
You seem nice
There are no natives anymore. For some time, really. Honestly I don’t even think there ever were.
This observation really resonates with me. I have spent a lot of energy trying to communicate that ditching formal languages for natural language is a terrible idea in some (most?) domains. The power of formal languages comes precisely from their "limitations".
Software is not the output. The output is the theory-building process by which one arrives a formal description of both the problem and (hopefully) the solution. Avoiding the effort to express a problem (or a model of the problem) in a formal language is a self-defeating enterprise.