✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

E.W.Dijkstra Archive: On the foolishness of "natural language programming". (EWD 667)

cs.utexas.edu · 1,069 words · saved by 1 readers

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. Machine code, with its absence of almost any form of redundancy, was soon identified as a needlessly risky interface between man and machine. Partly in response to this recognition so-called "high-level programming languages" were developed, and, as time went by, we learned to a certain extent how to enhance the protection against silly

E.W.Dijkstra Archive: On the foolishness of "natural language programming". (EWD 667) EWD 667 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 th

Explore this link on the map →

saved by

related reading