Re:Nerd: The First Programming Language Not Built for Humans
by kenferry on Wednesday December 31, 2025 @08:52PM
(#46450486)
Seems like engagement bait or a thought exercise more than a realistic project.
> "But I need to debug!"
> Do you debug JVM bytecode? V8's internals? No. You debug at your abstraction layer. If that layer is natural language, debugging becomes: "Hey Claude, the login is failing for users with + in their email."
Folks can get away without reading assembly only when the compiler is reliable. English -> code compilation by llms is not reliable. It will become more reliable, but (a) isn’t now so I guess this is a project to “provoke thought” (b) you’re going to need several nines of reliability, which I would bet against in any sane timeframe (b) English isn’t well specified enough to have “correct” compilation, so unclear if “several nines of reliability” is even theoretically possible.
> "But I need to debug!"
> Do you debug JVM bytecode? V8's internals? No. You debug at your abstraction layer. If that layer is natural language, debugging becomes: "Hey Claude, the login is failing for users with + in their email."
Folks can get away without reading assembly only when the compiler is reliable. English -> code compilation by llms is not reliable. It will become more reliable, but (a) isn’t now so I guess this is a project to “provoke thought” (b) you’re going to need several nines of reliability, which I would bet against in any sane timeframe (b) English isn’t well specified enough to have “correct” compilation, so unclear if “several nines of reliability” is even theoretically possible.