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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: 0s | 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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nightfly ◴[03 Apr 25 08:05 UTC] No.43566411[source]▶
The first step isn't from natural language to formal language. It's from the idea in your head into natural language. Getting that step right in a way that a computer could hope to turn into a useful thing is hard.
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1. jasode ◴[03 Apr 25 10:37 UTC] No.43567613[source]▶
>It's from the idea in your head into natural language. Getting that step right in a way that a computer could hope to turn into a useful thing is hard.

The "inside the head" conversion step would be more relevant in the reply to the gp if the hypothetical AI computer would be hooked up directly to brain implants like neuralink, functional MRI scans, etc to translate brain activity to natural language or programming language code.

But today, human developers who are paid to code for business people are not translating brain implant output signals. (E.g. Javascript programmers are not translating raw electrical waveforms[1] into React code.)

Instead, they translate from "natural language" specifications of businesspeople to computer code. This layer of translation is more tractable for future AI computers even though natural language is more fuzzy and ambiguous. The language ambiguity in business requirements is unavoidable but it still hasn't stopped developers from somehow converting it into concrete non-ambiguous code.

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/06/844908/a-new-imp...