Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming"

Posted by nimbleplum40 4/3/2025

Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming"(www.cs.utexas.edu)

448 points | 275 commentspage 5

cpuguy83 4/3/2025|

One of the things LLM's/natural language programming brings is greater access. While the actual code may be crap, it opens up things to more people to play around and iterate on ideas without having to have a ton of knowledge. That is powerful by itself.

nyeah 4/3/2025||

But Dijkstra was writing long ago. I'm sure the situation is greatly improved today.

fedeb95 4/3/2025||

this clearly has nothing to do with the current main usages of LLMs, it's about using natural language as an interface to produce accurate results, as a further abstraction on top of general purpose languages.

recursive 4/3/2025|

What is the difference between those things?

fedeb95 4/4/2025||

LLMs take natural language as input and produces it as output (note that producing source code is the same thing). The algorithm that takes input and produces output is still written in mathematical precise symbols and needs to be accurate, even if the input and output aren't expressed in a formal language.

We will see if and when an algorithm can be parsed and executed from a natural language "source code" and if that is an improvement.

Also note that "source code" implies it is a code. Natural languages are not a code, that is, a unique mapping from a set to another.

ma9o 4/3/2025||

People are supposed to communicate symbolically with LLMs too

quantum_state 4/3/2025||

A language is invented for a domain for precision and clarity the natural language cannot provide … trying to do the opposite would certainly create more work

charlieyu1 4/4/2025||

Natural language is just never good enough for computing tasks. We should learn to speak logic languages instead

tempodox 4/4/2025||

The voice of reason, but no amount of reason can dissuade anybody from believing what they want to believe.

dr_dshiv 4/3/2025||

He didn’t understand the concept of the vibe. Here’s the best theory article I’ve read

https://www.glass-bead.org/article/a-theory-of-vibe/

relaxing 4/3/2025||

What is with the mix of high academia and lowbrow language? Does the author think it’s cute? Covering for something?

> the computations involved in autoencoding… are mathematically intractable

OK, so he doesn’t understand what he’s talking about.

> Peli Grietzer recently finished his PhD in mathematically informed literary theory at Harvard Comparative Literature

How is this a thing.

serallak 4/3/2025||

The difference between the clarity of Dijkstra writing and the text at this link is astounding.

dr_dshiv 4/3/2025||

Vibes aren’t really about clarity, are they? The point is that a clear, programmatic approach is not the only effective computational mechanism for realizing intentions anymore.

Keep in mind that Dijkstra had some giant shoulders to stand on. This article is the very first one I’ve ever seen that directly dealt with vibes.

WillAdams 4/3/2025||

The thing is, for at least some readers, the attraction of _The Glass Bead Game_ and similar abstractions is that they should be able to communicate more clearly, and without the ambiguity of natural language, but with a naturalness which allows unbridled expression.

I really would like to see such a programming system realized, see efforts at:

https://github.com/IndieSmiths/myappmaker-sdd

but the more I work at programming, the more the solution seems to be documentation, and the best system for documenting code and the information about it seems to be:

http://literateprogramming.com/

I just need to find the perfect GUI toolkit which allows Bézier Curve representations in a way which clicks and makes sense to me, and suits my next project.

skydhash 4/3/2025||

> I just need to find the perfect GUI toolkit which allows Bézier Curve representations in a way which clicks and makes sense to me, and suits my next project.

Not a proper answer, but here is a very good video on splines:

https://youtu.be/jvPPXbo87ds

WillAdams 4/3/2025||

It was that video which gave me the hope that I would be able to master the math necessary for what I wish to do.

recursivedoubts 4/3/2025||

looks at https://hyperscript.org

laughs nervously

auggierose 4/3/2025|

Formal can be foolish, too. If you don't believe that, then I have a set for sale, with the property that it contains all sets that don't contain itself.

throwaway587468 4/3/2025|

The problem you’re referring to arose precisely due to lack of formalism. It was a problem back when mathematicians were toying with naive set theory, one not based on axioms, but instead on intuitive terminology. Moving to axiomatic, more formal, set theory solved it.

auggierose 4/3/2025||

The problem is the same, no matter if you look at it formally or informally. You could get your set theory axioms wrong, for example, but you would still be formal. Oh wait, you have a proof that set theory is consistent, right?

More comments...