English Is a Terrible Programming Language | Hacker News Reader

English Is a Terrible Programming Language

orbistertius.substack.com

20 pointsdawsoneliasen13 comments

English is a wonderful programming language, you’re just looking at it from the perspective of the limitations of current-day machines.

A product manager with access to a sophisticated organic AI programmer whose model is fine-tuned on their company’s internal data can create real working and tested code in an existing codebase with nothing more than a few sentences in a Jira card.

There’s absolutely no coding language in the world with that kind of expressiveness.

it took a revolutionary product(chatgpt) to even get to a point where we can think about using english as a "programming language". "Classical" programming languages have been around for way longer and have been alright so far, I'd argue that english is a terrible PL if it took decades of advancement to even merely _think_ about this idea in a realistic way.

We all know that natural language communication between people never leads to misunderstanding.

English is so wonderful, just to understand law (which then still has to be interpreted because of amiguity) we have fully fledged professions called "lawyer" and "judge" which learn how to deal with this awesome programming language for a handful of years before they are even allowed to start appling this programming language in practice at all.

It achieves greatness by leveraging the hardware it runs on.

Imagine the code necessary for a Roomba-like device to implement "Run to the shop and buy me an apple, home grown and not bruised, but only if it's not stupid expensive" (one of the more trivial English programs.)

You forgot to say to pay attention to cars on the street. The executor of your code just got executed in a car accident.

Oh, you mean car evasion is built in? Why isn't the same complexity then built into the roomba? Apples and oranges.

Kind of my point, roombas need code for things like how to cross a road, what a bruised apple looks like.

Humans have this in well, wetware I guess :)

Yeah, but it doesn't mean that English is a great programming language. It rather means it's worse if even humans with so much builtin stuff have to learn so long to use mit more-or-less correctly. ;)

As usual, it's the whole platform not the specific language that's great :)

The laws that get passed are the ones that get enough votes to be passed, not the ones that use the English language at maximum capacity, so that doesn't really tell you much about the capabilities of the English language.

If someone rewrote the U.S constitution to be 1000% clearer, it would never pass into law because politicians cannot agree what the U.S. Constitution should say about issues like abortion.

Let's assume I agree with what you say. It still doesn't explain why people go through years of training, examinations and tests just because some parts are unclear on purpose.

Most states require a law degree to be an attorney, but according to Wikipedia "Until the late 19th century, law schools were uncommon in the United States. Most people entered the legal profession through reading law, a form of independent study or apprenticeship, often under the supervision of an experienced attorney." Wikipedia indicates Abraham Lincoln was a self taught lawyer.

Since the requirement has changed but our language hasn't I don't know that the requirement tells you must about the language.

Mentat Thufir Hawat's orders in Lynch's rendition of Dune.

"Sector six-eighty, copy the sixth the sum of the eighth quadrant of the ninth plus eight-four circles weave the eighth quarter the fourth, copy!"

That is a pretty high-level programming dialect of English.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com