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yencabulator04/03/20251 replyview on HN

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


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falcor8404/03/2025

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?

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