E.W.Dijkstra: On the foolishness of "natural language programming"

Post by DougBTX » Wed, Nov 17, 2010, 3:00 PM UTC

hasenj wrote: post #11

jimmyjim wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's often the foolhardy and the ignorant that tackle problems that are supposedly impossible. And sometimes end up succeeding. Wisdom is certainly something to take from, but embodying the limits imposed by someone as a roadblock to onself isn't the way to innovation.

Let's suppose it's a really easy problem to solve. Why the hell would anyone want to program in a natural language? Suppose you could write a kernel in such a language, and one of the instructions was: "Load the first 5 bits at address 0x323abc into the last 5 bits after address 0x89bbca" Now, wouldn't it be easier to say 'shuffle_bits(5, 0x232abc, 0x89bbca);' where you control precisely what 'shuffle_bits' does?

    load_first_five_bits_into(0x323abc)
    load_last_five_bits_into(0x89bbca)

    [----5----|----n----|----5----]
    [0x323abc |void     |0x89bbca ]

Post by lkozma » Wed, Nov 17, 2010, 3:28 PM UTC

acangiano wrote: post #35

"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." — Arthur C. Clarke's First Law

Post by gryan » Wed, Nov 17, 2010, 3:38 PM UTC

acangiano wrote: post #35

"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." — Arthur C. Clarke's First Law

Post by huadie » Wed, Nov 17, 2010, 3:58 PM UTC

Post by contextfree » Wed, Nov 17, 2010, 4:28 PM UTC

DougBTX wrote: post #40

ozataman wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I don't think this has to do with dynamic vs static typing. It is more about strong vs weak typing, i.e. implicit type casting. In many dynamically but strongly typed languages (like Ruby), you would still get a type mismatch when you try to add a string to a number at runtime. It's just that with static typing, you would have realized your error much earlier at compile time.

While I think you're right, my guess is that he had strong static typing in mind when he wrote the article. Ultimately they lie on a scale. With a dynamic, strongly typed language, you still leave plenty of opportunity to make undetected mistakes. The obvious example is changing the expected type of a method argument, while only updating a subset of the call sites.