[simondw]

The idea is appealing, I think, because it feels like a step toward what is surely the ultimate goal: flawless natural language generation from some semantic encoding. If you squint, these functions and arguments are the semantic encoding, and their implementations are doing their best to imitate the NLG for an extremely limited domain.

Of course, the problem is that implementations like this are actually stepping away from the very good NLG system we already have: human translators, who typically aren't coders. And the need for NLG hasn't gone away -- someone still has to hardcode these (parameterized) strings.