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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: 0.205s | source
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jedimastert ◴[03 Apr 25 11:59 UTC] No.43568368[source]▶
> It was a significant improvement that now many a silly mistake did result in an error message instead of in an erroneous answer. (And even this improvement wasn't universally appreciated: some people found error messages they couldn't ignore more annoying than wrong results, and, when judging the relative merits of programming languages, some still seem to equate "the ease of programming" with the ease of making undetected mistakes.)

If I didn't know who wrote this it would seem like a jab directly at people who dislike Rust.

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1. mjburgess ◴[03 Apr 25 13:20 UTC] No.43569202[source]▶
As a person who dislikes rust, the problem is the error messages when there's no error -- quite a different problem. The rust type system is not an accurate model of RAM, the CPU and indeed, no device.

He's here talking about interpreted languages.

He's also one of those mathematicians who are now called computer scientists whose 'algorithms' are simple restatements of mathematics and require no devices. A person actively hostile, in temperament, to the embarrassing activity of programming an actual computer.