Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming"

(2010)

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

The original text was from 1978 according to other sources

Right, it seemed earlier.

Ah, thanks. Yes it couldn't have been 2010 because he died in 2002. But the date this was written is important, otherwise his references to "the last decade" don't mean anything!

Many would say that "the last decade" (with the surrounding context) is timeless, or at least that it is still relevant today.

Apple didn't learn those lessons with Apple Script either: there is a rigid sequence of characters that represents a valid program and if you're off by one character, tough. If you're lucky, the tool will guide you to what it wants. If not, you're stuck looking up the exact syntax so off to the reference manual you go, either way.

So there's minimal to looking up the syntax, whether it's based on some natural language phrase or a less wordy or ambiguous artificial language.

"friendly" or "natural" really is not a thing.