CommunityNews

CommunityNews

Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming"

Since the early days of automatic computing we have had people that have felt it as a shortcoming that programming required the care and accuracy that is characteristic for the use of any formal symbolism. They blamed the mechanical slave for its strict obedience with which it carried out its given instructions, even if a moment’s thought would have revealed that those instructions contained an obvious mistake. “But a moment is a long time, and thought is a painful process.” (A.E.Houseman). They eagerly hoped and waited for more sensible machinery that would refuse to embark on such nonsensical activities as a trivial clerical error evoked at the time.

Read in full here:

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667.html

Popular General Dev topics Top

AstonJ
If it’s a mechanical keyboard, which switches do you have? Would you recommend it? Why? What will your next keyboard be? Pics always w...
New
New
AstonJ
There’s a whole world of custom keycaps out there that I didn’t know existed! Check out all of our Keycaps threads here: https://forum....
New
New
Maartz
Hi folks, I don’t know if I saw this here but, here’s a new programming language, called Roc Reminds me a bit of Elm and thus Haskell. ...
New
foxtrottwist
A few weeks ago I started using Warp a terminal written in rust. Though in it’s current state of development there are a few caveats (tab...
New
Sylvia
About talentbay Our online networking platform connects students with teams in business and industry. It consists of our mobile app for ...
New
First poster: dimitarvp
Rails is not written in Ruby. I’m born and raised in Kraków, a beautiful city in Poland, maybe you’ve heard about it, maybe you’ve even ...
New
OvermindDL1
Yet another rust-made text editor, though I’m really liking the looks of how this one works!
New
First poster: bot
Apple’s Tim Cook to take 50% pay hit after shareholder feedback. ‘Target compensation’ for CEO down from $99.4m in 2022 to an expected $...
New

Other popular topics Top

Exadra37
I am thinking in building or buy a desktop computer for programing, both professionally and on my free time, and my choice of OS is Linux...
New
foxtrottwist
Here’s our thread for the Keyboardio Atreus. It is a mechanical keyboard based on and a slight update of the original Atreus (Keyboardio ...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
“Finding the Boundaries” Hero’s Journey with Noel Rappin @noelrappin Even when you’re ultimately right about what the future ho...
New
dimitarvp
Small essay with thoughts on macOS vs. Linux: I know @Exadra37 is just waiting around the corner to scream at me “I TOLD YOU SO!!!” but I...
New
AstonJ
In case anyone else is wondering why Ruby 3 doesn’t show when you do asdf list-all ruby :man_facepalming: do this first: asdf plugin-upd...
New
mafinar
Crystal recently reached version 1. I had been following it for awhile but never got to really learn it. Most languages I picked up out o...
New
AstonJ
We’ve talked about his book briefly here but it is quickly becoming obsolete - so he’s decided to create a series of 7 podcasts, the firs...
New
AstonJ
Was just curious to see if any were around, found this one: I got 51/100: Not sure if it was meant to buy I am sure at times the b...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight: VM Brasseur @vmbrasseur We have a treat for you today! We turn the spotlight onto Open Source as we sit down with V...
New
AstonJ
Chris Seaton, the creator of TruffleRuby has died. It appears from suicide :cry: He left this note on Twitter on the weekend: And one...
New