Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming"

This is the most beautiful thing I've read in a long time.

Reminds me of another recurring idea of replacing code with flowcharts. First I've seen that idea coming from some unknown Soviet professor from 80s, and then again and again from different people from different countries in different contexts. Every time it is sold as a total breakthrough in simplicity and also every time it proves to be a bloat of complexity and a productivity killer instead.

Or weak typing. How many languages thought that simplifying strings and integers and other types into "scalar", and making any operation between any operands meaningful, would simplify the language? Yet every single one ended up becoming a total mess instead.

Or constraint-based UI layout. Looks so simple, so intuitive on simple examples, yet totally failing to scale to even a dozen of basic controls. Yet the idea keeps reappearing from time to time.

Or an attempt at dependency management by making some form of symlink to another repository e.g. git modules, or CMake's FetchContent/ExternalProject? Yeah, good luck scaling that.

Maybe software engineering should have some sort of "Hall of Ideas That Definitely Don't Work", so that young people entering the field could save their time on implementing one more incarnation of an already known not good idea.

(2010)

This refers to the era of COBOL, or maybe Hypertalk, not LLMs.

Natural language is pretty good for describing the technical requirements for the complex system, though. I.e. not the current code implementation, but why the current code implementation is selected vs other possible implementations. Not what code do, but what it is expected to do. Basically, most of the missing parts, that live in Jira-s, instead of your repo. It is also good, at allowing better refactoring capabilities, when all your system is described by outside rules, which could be enforced on the whole codebase. We just use programming languages, because it is easier to use in automated/computer context (and was the only way to use, to be honest, before all the LLM stuff). Though, while it gives us non-ambiguity on the local scale, it stops working on the global scale, the first moment person went and copy-pasted part of the code. Are you sure that part follows all the high-level restrictions we should to follow and is correct program? It is program that would run, when compile, but definition of run is pretty loose. In C++ program that corrupts all the memory is also runnable.