We mourn our craft

Re:We mourn our craft by godelski on Saturday February 07, 2026 @05:24PM (#46928809)

  >  it needs to be "build the right things right", vs "build things right and then discover if they are the right things"

I still think this is a bad comparison and I hoped my prior comment would handle this. Frankly, you're always going to end up in the second situation[0] simply because of 2 hard truths. 1) you're not omniscient and 2) even if you were, the environment isn't static.

  > But considering that AI will more and more "build things right" by default

And this is something I don't believe. I say a lot more here[1] but you can skip my entire comment and just read what Dijkstra has to say himself. I dislike that we often pigeonhole this LLM coding conversation into one about a deterministic vs probabilistic language. Really the reason I'm not in favor of LLMs is because I'm not in favor of natural language programming[2]. The reason I'm not in favor of natural language programming has nothing to do with its probabilistic nature and everything to do with its lack of precision[3].

I'm with Dijkstra because, like him, I believe we invented symbolic formalism for a reason. Like him, I believe that abstraction is incredibly useful and powerful, but it is about the right abstraction for the job.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46911268

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46928421

[2] At the end of the day, that's what they are. Even if they produce code you're still treating it as a transpiler: turning natural language into code.

[3] Okay, technically it does but that's because probability has to do with this[4] and I'm trying to communicate better and most people aren't going to connect the dots (pun intended) between function mapping and probabilities. The lack of precision is inherently representable through the language of probability but most people aren't familiar with terms like "image" and "pre-image" nor "push-forward" and "pull-back". The pedantic nature of this note is precisely illustrative of my point.

[4] https://www.mathsisfun.com/sets/injective-surjective-bijecti...

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Re:We mourn our craft by wtetzner on Sunday February 08, 2026 @09:30AM (#46934493)

> The reason I'm not in favor of natural language programming has nothing to do with its probabilistic nature and everything to do with its lack of precision

Yeah, even if they're made to be 100% deterministic, you've now got a programming language whose rules are deterministic, but hard to understand. You've effectively pinned the meaning of the natural language in some way, but not a way that anyone can effectively learn, and one that doesn't necessarily match their understanding of the actual natural language.

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Re:We mourn our craft by godelski on Sunday February 08, 2026 @01:06PM (#46936863)

And it's weird that this even needs to be argued given that our long explanations are needed to even convey fairly simple concepts. Not to mention that it still relies upon correct interpretation.

The result of natural language programming is either an extremely limited programming language or an extremely verbose one (again, look at law). Presumably it'll result in both.

It's a nice idea but ignores the reason we invented symbolic languages in the first place. They were invented after natural language. It's not like code is some vestigial language raiment. We're trying to replace it because it's hard and annoying. But I'm certain that's mainly due to the level of abstraction we're trying to work with more than due to the language we're using

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