> The foolishness of "natural language programming"

Wasn't that the actual motivation behind the development of SQL?

IIRC, SQL was something that "even" business people could code in because it was closer to "natural language".

When you see the monstrosity the motivation gave birth to, I think the "foolish" argument was well warranted at the time.

Of course, in these days of LLM's, Dijkstra's argument isn't as clear cut (even if LLM's aren't there yet, they're getting much closer).