Naturalistic Programming: Model and Implementation

Naturalistic programming is defined as a programming technique that uses abstractions whose expressiveness is close to natural languages. The objective is preserving as much as possible the needs of the client in their language, while the text of these needs is simultaneously the requirements specification and the program source code. Consequently, the goal of the naturalistic paradigm is reducing the gap between problem domain and solution domain. In the literature, two main approaches are reported, one focuses on transforming controlled natural languages into high level code, such as Java and Python; in the other approach the requirements description is at the same time the program source code. While the translators employed in the first approach do not offer a new paradigm, the few naturalistic languages reported have utility in specific domains. In the absence of a naturalistic framework, this article presents the minimum elements for defining a naturalistic model that allows the creation of general-purpose languages and at the same time, the SN language is introduced as a proof-of-concept, which is a prototype language for naturalistic programming.