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.

the vibe coding seems a lot like the dream of using UML, but in a distinctly different direction, and how in theory (and occasional practice) you can create a two way street, most often these things are one way conversions and while we all desire some level of two way dependency and continual integration to make certain aspects of coding (documentation, testing) to be up to date, the reality is that the generative code aspect always breaks and you're always going to be left with the raw products of these tools and it's rarely going to be a cycle of code -> tool -> code. And thus the ultimate value beyond the bootstrap is lose.

We're still going to have AI tools, but seriously complex applications, the ones we pay money for, arn't going to yield many LLM based curation strategies. There will probably be some great documentation and testing ones, but the architetural-code paradigm isnt going to yield any time soon.