A Proposal of Naturalistic Software Development Method

Abstract

Naturalistic programming purports to include natural language elements in programming languages to increase software expressiveness. Even though natural language is inherently ambiguous, it is richer and thus more expressive than any artificial language. Currently, the Naturalistic Programming Paradigm (NPP) is supported by its conceptual model and three general-purpose naturalistic programming languages that can generate executable binary code. Nevertheless, to date, no research efforts have been concentrated on applying the NPP within a software development process. To address this gap, in this article, we propose a naturalistic software development method to test the advantages of the NPP. The method focuses on the analysis and design stages of the software development process and seeks to contribute to closing the gap between the problem and the solution domains. We also present an example of an implementation using Cal-4700, a naturalistic programming language, showing the differences in expressiveness of programming with a traditional programming language, like Python.