Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming"

People are sticking up for LLMs here and that's cool.

I wonder, what if you did the opposite? Take a project of moderate complexity and convert it from code back to natural language using your favorite LLM. Does it provide you with a reasonable description of the behavior and requirements encoded in the source code without losing enough detail to recreate the program? Do you find the resulting natural language description is easier to reason about?

I think there's a reason most of the vibe-coded applications we see people demonstrate are rather simple. There is a level of complexity and precision that is hard to manage. Sure, you can define it in plain english, but is the resulting description extensible, understandable, or more descriptive than a precise language? I think there is a reason why legalese is not plain English, and it goes beyond mere gatekeeping.

Sure but we build (leaky) abstractions, and this is even happens in legal texts.

Asking an llm to build a graphical app in assembly from an ISA and a driver for the display would give you nothing.

But with a mountain of abstractions then it can probably do it.

This is not to defend an LLM more to say I think that by providing the right abstractions (reusable components) then I do think it will get you a lot closer.