Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming"

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?

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.

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.

Are you saying it's impossible to program without first formulating a natural language sentence? That sounds dubious at the very least.

That's a really deep question. Obviously there are types of creativity that don't require words, like painting or sculpting, or improvising music, but I'm having real difficulty imagining programming without something at least resembling natural language. The closest my imagination gets is Scratch/Blockly, but even then you're essentially creating an AST composed out of statements and expressions, even if they're pictorial.

Can you imagine the (intentional) creation of a program entirely without language?

Or, I suppose, if you're ok with it not being intentional, you can program via an evolutionary algorithm - is that what you have in mind?

I think you're the kind of person who has an internal voice talking in their head, and can't imagine any other kind of thought?

Math is all about abstract shapes and properties, for me. So is much of programming.