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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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1. oytis ◴[03 Apr 25 10:32 UTC] No.43567561[source]▶
> 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.

FWIW, neural networks would be in that pool until relatively recently.

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2. antonvs ◴[03 Apr 25 11:47 UTC] No.43568250[source]▶
If we change "definitely don't work" to "have the following so far insurmountable challenges", it addresses cases like this. Hardware scaling limitations on neural networks have been known to be a limitation for a long time - Minsky and Papert touched in this in Perceptrons in 1969.

The Hall would then end up containing a spectrum ranging from useless ideas to hard problems. Distinguishing between the two based on documented challenges would likely be possible in many cases.