title: Is functional programming the next step towards natural-language programming?
body: <p>This is my very first question so I am a bit nervous about it because I am not sure whether I get the meaning across well enough. Anyhow, here we go....</p>
  
  <p>Whenever new milestones in programming have been reached it seems they always have had one goal in common: to make it easier for programmers, well, to program.</p>
  
  <p>Machine language, opcodes/mnemonics, procedures/functions, structs, classes (OOP) etc. always helped, in their time, to plan, structure and code programs in a more natural,  understandable and better maintainable way.</p>
  
  <p>Of course functional programming is by no means a novelty but it seems that it has experienced a sort of renaissance in recent years. I also believe that FP will get an enormous boost when Microsoft will add F# to their mainstream programming languages.</p>
  
  <p>Returning to my original question, I believe that ultimately programming will be done in a natural language (English) with very few restrictions or rules. The compiler will be part of an AI/NLP system that extracts information from the code or should I say text and transforms it into an intermediate language which the compiler can compile.</p>
  
  <p>So, does FP take programming closer to natural-language programming or is it rather an obstacle and mainstream OOP will lead us faster to natural-language programming?</p>
  
  <p>This question should not be used to discuss the useability or feasability of natural-language programming because only the future will tell. </p>