Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming"

LLMs are usually used to describe goals or to provide feedback (correction or encouragement) towards its implementation.

Programming is about iteratively expressing a path towards satisfying said goals.

What LLMs are doing now is converting "requirements" into "formalizations".

I don't think Djikstra is wrong in saying - that performing programming in plain-language is a pretty weird idea.

We want to concretize ideas in formalisms. But that's not what any human (including Djikstra) starts with... you start with some sort of goal, some sort of need and requirements.

LLMs merely reduce the time/effort required to go from goals -> formalism.

TLDR: Requirements != Implementation

(2010) by the way, which makes this article all the more impressive.

I was under the assumption this was a current body of work seeing as Dijkstra spoke so well about the possibilities but this just goes to show some people were ahead of their tike with their worries.

Also adding your home address to something you write / publish / host on the internet is pretty hardcore.

Is this necessarily a stance against LLM? LLMs can generate real code, ideally functional, strict code instead of the slop they do these days.

> I suspect that machines to be programmed in our native tongues —be it Dutch, English, American, French, German, or Swahili— are as damned difficult to make as they would be to use.

Seeing as transformers are relatively simple to implement…

It stands to reason he was, in some sense, right. LLMs are damn easy to use.

Personal context is tacit experience. Cultural context is aggregate.

Wittgenstein stated that the differences between personal and cultural language makes it impossible to agree on anything foundational to philosophy.

Godel did something similar to discrete structures by hacking self reference -- a kind of recursive self reference with no exit state.

I think pair programming with an LLM is interesting. You get to compare personal context with aggregate context. Plus, the external feedback helps me break out of excessive personal self reference.