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Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming"

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448 points nimbleplum40 | 1 comments | 03 Apr 25 03:30 UTC | HN request time: 0.284s | source
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misja111 ◴[03 Apr 25 06:40 UTC] No.43565639[source]▶
I somewhat disagree with this. In real life, say in some company, the inception of an idea for a new feature is made in the head of some business person. This person will not speak any formal language. So however you turn it, some translation from natural language to machine language will have to be done to implement the feature.

Typically the first step, translation from natural to formal language, will be done by business analysts and programmers. But why not try to let computers help along the way?

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1. James_K ◴[03 Apr 25 10:29 UTC] No.43567538[source]▶
Because then you don't know what the computer's doing. The whole point of this article was that there is value in the process of writing your ideas out formally. If you "let computers help you along the way", you'll run straight into the issue of needing an increasingly formal natural language to get sufficiently good results from the machine.