# Naturalizing a Programming Language via Interactive Learning

## TL;DR

This paper presents a method for incrementally naturalizing a core programming language through user interaction, enabling more natural and complex commands in a voxel world, with high adoption over a few days.

## Contribution

It introduces an interactive learning approach for naturalizing programming languages, demonstrated by a system where users collaboratively expand a language in a voxel environment.

## Key findings

- Users adopted the naturalized language in 85.9% of utterances after three days.
- The system supports diverse language extensions through user-defined syntax.
- Hundreds of complex voxel structures were built using the naturalized language.

## Abstract

Our goal is to create a convenient natural language interface for performing well-specified but complex actions such as analyzing data, manipulating text, and querying databases. However, existing natural language interfaces for such tasks are quite primitive compared to the power one wields with a programming language. To bridge this gap, we start with a core programming language and allow users to "naturalize" the core language incrementally by defining alternative, more natural syntax and increasingly complex concepts in terms of compositions of simpler ones. In a voxel world, we show that a community of users can simultaneously teach a common system a diverse language and use it to build hundreds of complex voxel structures. Over the course of three days, these users went from using only the core language to using the naturalized language in 85.9\% of the last 10K utterances.