Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming"

People are sticking up for LLMs here and that's cool.

I wonder, what if you did the opposite? Take a project of moderate complexity and convert it from code back to natural language using your favorite LLM. Does it provide you with a reasonable description of the behavior and requirements encoded in the source code without losing enough detail to recreate the program? Do you find the resulting natural language description is easier to reason about?

I think there's a reason most of the vibe-coded applications we see people demonstrate are rather simple. There is a level of complexity and precision that is hard to manage. Sure, you can define it in plain english, but is the resulting description extensible, understandable, or more descriptive than a precise language? I think there is a reason why legalese is not plain English, and it goes beyond mere gatekeeping.

> Do you find the resulting natural language description is easier to reason about?

An example from an different field - aviation weather forecasts and notices are published in a strongly abbreviated and codified form. For example, the weather at Sydney Australia now is:

  METAR YSSY 031000Z 08005KT CAVOK 22/13 Q1012 RMK RF00.0/000.0

It's almost universal that new pilots ask "why isn't this in words?". And, indeed, most flight planning apps will convert the code to prose.

But professional pilots (and ATC, etc) universally prefer the coded format. Is is compact (one line instead of a whole paragraph), the format well defined (I know exactly where to look for the one piece I need), and it's unambiguous and well defined.

Same for maths and coding - once you reach a certain level of expertise, the complexity and redundancy of natural language is a greater cost than benefit. This seems to apply to all fields of expertise.

The point of LLM is to enable "ordinary people" to write software. This movement is along with "zero code platform", for example. Creating algorithms by drawing block-schemes, by dragging rectangles and arrows. This is old discussion and there are many successful applications of this nature. LLM is just another attempt to tackle this beast.

Professional developers don't need this ability indeed. Most professional developers, who had to deal with zero code platforms, probably would prefer to just work with ordinary code.

I think this is the principle-agent problem at work. Managers/executives who don't understand what programmers do believing that programmers can be easily replaced. Why wouldn't LLM vendors offer to sell it to them?

I pity the programmers of the future who will be tasked with maintaining the gargantuan mess these things end up creating.