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.

I'm not so sure it's about precision rather than working memory. My presumption is people struggle to understand sufficiently large prose versions for the same reason a LLM would struggle working with larger prose versions: people have limited working memory. The time needed to reload info from prose is significant. People reading large text works will start highlighting and taking notes and inventing shorthand forms in their notes. Compact forms and abstractions help reduce demands for working memory and information search. So I'm not sure it's about language precision.

So is more compact better? Does K&R's *d++ = *s++; get a pass now?

When I first read the K&R book, that syntax made perfectly sense. They are building up to it through a few chapters, if I remember correctly.

What has changed is that nowadays most developers aren't doing low-level programming anymore, where the building blocks of that expression (or the expression itself) would be common idioms.