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Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming"

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448 points nimbleplum40 | 4 comments | 03 Apr 25 03:30 UTC | HN request time: 0.823s | 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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falcor84 ◴[03 Apr 25 10:28 UTC] No.43567536[source]▶
Without descending fully into epistemology, I tend to think that there is no proper "idea" in your head before it's phrased in language - the act of initially describing something in natural language *is* the act of generating it.
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1. antonvs ◴[03 Apr 25 10:45 UTC] No.43567679[source]▶
Research on LLMs suggest that's probably not the case. See the work on reasoning in latent space, and on shared concepts between languages being represented independently of the individual language.

Of course one might argue that even if LLMs are capable of ideation and conceptualisation without natural language, doesn't mean humans are.

But the fact that up to 50% of people have no inner monologue seems to refute that.

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2. card_zero ◴[03 Apr 25 14:53 UTC] No.43570643[source]▶
Humans can't share ideas directly, they pass through language. Some idea is created at the other end, nominally the same one, but there's no reason to suppose a universal internal format. Even translating between human languages loses details, where words in one language map imperfectly to words in another. Moving ideas directly from one brain to another probably can't happen. So the statement in language doesn't map very well to the idea (whichever person's version of the idea). And at some point before the idea is formed there has to be some sort of proto-idea or potential, with less definite boundaries. So "there is no proper idea" sounds right to me. There's something idiosyncratic, not the formal idea that's frozen when put into words.
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3. antonvs ◴[05 Apr 25 13:38 UTC] No.43593407[source]▶
Sure, you can define "proper" and "idea" to the claim post-facto to change what's being claimed, but the point is we do have ideas without language, and converting into language is not creating the idea.
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4. card_zero ◴[05 Apr 25 13:50 UTC] No.43593531{3}[source]▶
Why not both? Yes, we have ideas without language: and, creating a form of words to express the idea is creating a new and somewhat different version.