Projects promoting programming in "natural language" are intrinsically doomed to fail.

The use of anthropomorphic terminology when dealing with computing systems is a symptom of professional immaturity.

Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.

The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities.

(Edsger W.Dijkstra, 18 June 1975)

More here:

https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html

#programming #software

Jun 23 · 6 months ago · 👍 akkartik

5 Comments ↓

in my oinion, people suggesting converting the coding to something "more understandable" don't know how to prgram and probably shouldnt be running a coding project?

The thing is the code is more understandable than names. For reference: https://youtu.be/SEp0NrXWwoo

Important context here, imo: This is coming from the guy who created the first ALGOL 60 compiler, and clearly wanted everything to be highly mathematical. You can't expect anything else from a mathematician, lmao.

I don't necessarily agree with his statements completely, and I think he's just calling people "immature" because he doesn't like it, not because it actually represents real immaturity from a psychological perspective. Which is gross.

Regardless, while I do not think computers, particularly generative AI, should be viewed as sentient beings, I also do not think we have to use an overly formal language. ALGOL 60 isn't even completely formal, although it's close enough that it's absolutely horrendous to understand!

But this is where my biggest disagreement with him is: ALGOL 60 *uses some natural language*, just like many other programming languages, because humans are not calculators, we are real imperfect animals. There's a reason APL didn't become the thing everybody based their languages off of, lmao.

Anyways, every Mathematics person I've been around have been some of the most self-centered obnoxious people ever. They think everything is mathematics, that everything should exclusively use mathematics symbols, and that no other field (like LINGUISTICS) is as important as theirs.

Kinda ashamed to say that I didn't recognize which essay it was from the quotes alone. Anyways, as somebody born much later than when this was published, most of these issues seem positively quaint compared to our actual problems. Not that they aren't valid, they are. As an aside, this essay gets misinterpreted so much that there should really be a version with all the relevant details about what exactly each of the points means (or at least what we think Dijksta meant).

You can just tell a LLM what to program and it will do it. I think that kind of obsoletes this.