> One way to look at Stackoverflow is that it's a gigantic index that maps "intuitive plain English" to "non-intuitive exact syntax".
It's not that syntax itself isn't intuitive; there's after all nothing more intuitive than, say, FORTH, LISP or Haskell syntax - surely it handily beats the weird idiosyncratics of "more English-like" FORTRAN or COBOL! It's actually the semantics of what you're interacting with, that, while simple, might be initially unintuitive to a naïve user. I don't think that I'm actually disagreeing with what you're saying; it's just that "not knowing the exact syntax for X" generally unpacks to something slightly different, namely "not knowing the relevant semantics to the extent that one can figure out how to do X". This, I think, is a better explanation of how StackOverflow might end up being quite helpful.
Of course, natural language itself does involve some semantics-related facets of its own, that might well end up being more intuitive than the programming-language semantics we normally use. But even then, we can (and should) use devices like Montague-semantics to give them an "intuitive", compositional syntax reminiscent of the lambda-calculus, Haskell or FORTH. I think this is the better way towards the goal of "using natural language to make programming more intuitive".
It's not that syntax itself isn't intuitive; there's after all nothing more intuitive than, say, FORTH, LISP or Haskell syntax - surely it handily beats the weird idiosyncratics of "more English-like" FORTRAN or COBOL! It's actually the semantics of what you're interacting with, that, while simple, might be initially unintuitive to a naïve user. I don't think that I'm actually disagreeing with what you're saying; it's just that "not knowing the exact syntax for X" generally unpacks to something slightly different, namely "not knowing the relevant semantics to the extent that one can figure out how to do X". This, I think, is a better explanation of how StackOverflow might end up being quite helpful.
Of course, natural language itself does involve some semantics-related facets of its own, that might well end up being more intuitive than the programming-language semantics we normally use. But even then, we can (and should) use devices like Montague-semantics to give them an "intuitive", compositional syntax reminiscent of the lambda-calculus, Haskell or FORTH. I think this is the better way towards the goal of "using natural language to make programming more intuitive".