Saturday, April 19, 2025

On the foolishness of NL programming

 The title of this post is but that of an article by the late E.W. Dijkstra that is still fully valid in these days of frantic work on LLMs:

The virtue of formal texts is that their manipulations, in order to be legitimate, need to satisfy only a few simple rules; they are, when you come to think of it, an amazingly effective tool for ruling out all sorts of nonsense that, when we use our native tongues, are almost impossible to avoid.

Instead of regarding the obligation to use formal symbols as a burden, we should regard the convenience of using them as a privilege: thanks to them, school children can learn to do what in earlier days only genius could achieve. When all is said and told, the "naturalness" with which we use our native tongues boils down to the ease with which we can use them for making statements the nonsense of which is not obvious.

You can access it here.


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