A really interesting read in the current era.

Natural language is full of nuances and implicit cultural and domain specific connotations. LLMs work because they have been trained on massive corpus of materials that encode some (but not all) of those hidden meanings.

With specification driven development, the prompts need to be very detailed in order to produce exactly what is required.

There’s em dashes in that 1978 article.

> (You have only to look at the indeed alarming amount of on close reading meaningless verbiage in scientific articles, technical reports, government publications etc.)

It is perhaps for the best that Djikstra did not live long enough to witness this problem become orders of magnitude worse.

This article shows every now and then, and it's a must read. Indeed the natural language programming requires massive clusters of gpus just to make a half baked crud app

I send this article to everyone who tells me how English is now a high-level programming language, the next step up the chain from machine language to <their favorite language>. This analogy tends to be followed by "Just like most programmers never look at assembly code, looking at higher-level source code is going to become rare".

Dijkstra's arguments tend not to change their minds. I think the analogy takes hold because there is a kernel of truth in it. AI models now give us the magical ability to program in natural language, but the implication that an AI model is a form of compiler is deeply flawed. AI models don't replace compilers, they replace software developers. The reason software developers rarely look at assembly code is that compilers (and emulators and VMs) are able to precisely preserve the semantics of the original program.

A natural language spec is not a program, and there are many possible programs that can meet the spec. Software engineers and AI models turn specs into code, but the code is not the spec I think the analogy clouds our thinking about the value of programming languages as a tool for formally describing what the computer should do and enforcing properties of the program that should not be left to either humans or AI models to uphold.