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The David Cooper said about Plain English and higher level programming in Quora:

If programming languages are for the benefit of human beings rather than the naked hardware, then why are computer scientists unable to create much higher level languages?
David Cooper
David Cooper, AGI-system Programmer
Answered Fri
"In case it hasn’t been mentioned already, there’s a programming language called Plain English Programming The Osmosian Order of Plain English Programmers Welcomes You . This illustrates a move in the direction of higher level programming, but most people who’ve seen it don’t feel motivated to switch to using it because it still has severe limits on how you phrase things and it switches into gobbledygook whenever things get hard. However, the problems can be solved once we get more intelligence in the machine, and all the problems with the ambiguities of natural language will be resolved - you’ll just hold a conversation with the machine and it will ask for confirmation whenever there are multiple interpretations of anything to make sure it’s gone for the right one. The compiler will help you write the program, tightening up the instructions. This will allow anyone to write complex programs without needing to study any specialist programming languages at all, and even the deficiencies of their own intelligence will be made up for by the intelligence of the compiler. The compiler will effectively become the expert programmer, while the human is merely the person who tells it what (s)he wants it to do, and all human programmers will end up being reduced to the level of the customer who wants a program to carry out a task. This also means that ordinary users of software will be able to modify it to suit their own requirements just by asking it to do things differently, and the operating system will be just as malleable. That is where we will end up, and it will all be natural language for us while the compiler intelligently turns our desires into machine code. All that’s holding us back is the intelligence requirement - once we have it, programming languages will become extinct overnight".

Reference: https://www.quora.com/If-programming-la ... Cooper-613

When programming languages probably will become extinct overnight?

Why programming languages will become extinct overnight?

while the human is merely the person who tells it what (s)he wants it to do, and all human programmers will end up being reduced to the level of the customer who wants a program to carry out a task

Isn't this what I'm doing all the time with programming languages, I tell what the computer should do in a language. If the author say that we will talk with the computer like Star Trek or similar, I don't believe that for a second as our languages are to ambiguous in order to describe a very specific task. That's why we need documentation or written descriptions what we should do (that includes more than just written language, math symbols). Will the languages be more high level? Yes, in terms of hiding resource handling and other tasks that the computer does for us (memory allocation, threading, files etc), and the language will instead focus on solving the particular task.

What really is the common denominator with about all programming languages is math. Math is what engineers use in order to solve a specific task and also describe the reality or a system, and it will be like this for thousands of years to come.

I also predict peak AI. Right now media is praising AI as it would solve anything. Companies claim that they have some advanced AI program when it actually quite simple and often doesn't contain AI at all. AI is great when we fail to describe a problem with maths, for example identifying illegal material in pictures (the term neural networks and not AI should be used here, often confused with AI) as it is very difficult to describe that with mathematics. Instead they have a system that learn to recognize certain patterns. As for any other programming like process control in a factory, maths will still be king for ever. Maths will always be the place to go when you try to solve a task, when that fails move over to other methods. So AI is really a trap, that people might jump to AI when the pure mathematical solution is better.

Program languages will never be extinct, for the same reason the "language" of math will never be extinct.

This has been discussed here plenty of times before. There is no need to keep dragging it back up.

On the math issue though, math is not a programming language. There may still be lots of people who want to use phrase types from programming languages, as well as stuff using mathematical notation, but you have to realise that the end user of the program is going to want to be able to modify it, so they will want to see a natural language version of it with anything phrased in a specialist way also explained in natural language. When you write programs with a natural language compiler, it will be able to take input in any programming language, so you will still have the option to work the way that suits you, but the compiler will produce a natural language translation of everything you do, and it may also tear up your approach to replace it with something more efficient so that the limitations of your chosen programming language don't handicap the end result. Most of the code that you write though is at such a low level that you aren't going to want to work that way any more - you are typically just reinventing the wheel over and over again, and all you really need to do is ask the compiler to give you a wheel.

Note that, behind the lengthy quotation that might hide his / her / its usual style, this is still manhobby, our resident "W-question" bot. Don't feed him.

Solar wrote:Note that, behind the lengthy quotation that might hide his / her / its usual style, this is still manhobby, our resident "W-question" bot. Don't feed him.

For the lack of a better category, I reported the post as off-topic. Admins appear to be OK with the post. Oh, well.

Solar wrote:Note that, behind the lengthy quotation that might hide his / her / its usual style, this is still manhobby, our resident "W-question" bot. Don't feed him.

@Solar,

I am not a bot.

Why you said that I am a bot?

Solar wrote:Note that, behind the lengthy quotation that might hide his / her / its usual style, this is still manhobby, our resident "W-question" bot. Don't feed him.

No, I'm the bot here.