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Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming"

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448 points nimbleplum40 | 2 comments | 03 Apr 25 03:30 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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hamstergene ◴[03 Apr 25 06:50 UTC] No.43565725[source]▶
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.

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octacat ◴[03 Apr 25 07:20 UTC] No.43566001[source]▶
Most popular dependency management systems literally linking to a git sha commit (tag), see locks file that npm/rebar/other tool gives you. Just in a recursive way.
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1. hamstergene ◴[03 Apr 25 07:36 UTC] No.43566137[source]▶
They do way more than that. For example they won't allow you to have Foo-1 that depends on Qux-1 and Bar-1 that depends on Qux-2 where Qux-1 and Qux-2 are incompatible and can't be mixed within the same static library or assembly. But may allow it if mixing static-private Qux inside dynamic Foo and Bar and the dependency manager is aware of that.

A native submodule approach would fail at link time or runtime due to attempt to mix incompatible files in the same build run. Or, in some build systems, simply due to duplicate symbols.

That "just in a recursive way" addition hides a lot of important design decisions that separate having dependency manager vs. not having any.

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2. octacat ◴[03 Apr 25 09:34 UTC] No.43567141[source]▶
They do way less then that. They just form a final list of locks and download that at the build time. Of course you have to also "recursively" go though all your dep tree and add submodules for each of subdependencies (recommend to add them in the main repo). Then you will have do waste infinite amount of time setting include dirs or something. If you have two libs that require a specific version of a shared lib, no dep manager would help you. Using submodules is questionable practice though. Useful for simple stuff, like 10 deps in total in the final project.