A friend recently nerdsniped me:
What do you make of the need for programming languages going away with more LLM usage? Is it going to be a bit like cursive?
Language empowers us to think about the world. Formal languages empower us with precision, gifting us a more perfect command over our subjects. Juggling notation made new tricks possible! Knowing notations & languages improves your vision, perception, understanding of the world. From knot theory to APL, mathematics and human discovery as a whole is an intergenerational project to tame and summarize the world with notations, tools of thought. Programming is theory building and caries this torch.
The COBOL project attempted to solve programming, hiding it in an intuitive English skin, intended for non-technical leaders to understand. (The siren’s song. Using English grammar and concepts seduces you into confusion, because a formal language has different grammar, semantics, limits, so your speech must be retrained.) Low-code approaches are even more instructive, letting you avoid the scary code / formal notation and grammar. But in both cases, they led to an explosion in more difficult roles than before like domain modelers working in obtuse formal schematics, themselves hidden notations with overlong untamed terminological confusion, ossifying their fields with mandatory, repeated boilerplate and ceremony.
If every user of an application needs to write the same code, your API is wrong. If you abstract away the boilerplate and reuse that abstraction, you’ve made the world better. If you create a tool that generates the boilerplate, you’ve made the world more fragile. - David Chisnall
A natural, informal language like English is not a formal language, by definition and tautology, English specifications or “code” are ambiguous. AI may let us wield computers with English, but useful thoughts and plans cannot be in natural language. In order to command, to instruct subordinates or computers, you must order, clarify and structure your thoughts, to yourself before anyone else. Asking for a thingamajig, your friend must interpret, yea make an informed guess what you mean. If you say “no, that’s not it”, why do you have to try LLMs multiple times?
Instead of regarding the obligation to use formal symbols as a burden, we should regard the convenience of using them as a privilege: thanks to them, school children can learn to do what in earlier days only genius could achieve. - Dijkstra
A short look at the history of mathematics shows how justified this challenge is. Greek mathematics got stuck because it remained a verbal, pictorial activity, Moslem “algebra”, after a timid attempt at symbolism, died when it returned to the rhetoric style, and the modern civilized world could only emerge —for better or for worse— when Western Europe could free itself from the fetters of medieval scholasticism —a vain attempt at verbal precision!— thanks to the carefully, or at least consciously designed formal symbolisms that we owe to people like Vieta, Descartes, Leibniz, and (later) Boole. - Dijkstra
Just consider the European music tradition without notation, gradually adding forms of it and gaining in complexity and expressive power as the notation enabled more complex thought. Compare it to trying to describe a melody with words! That’s what this approach promises.
Alexis King touched on similar ground recently, feeling stuck in the Platonic spheres. I believe she’s throwing out the baby with the bathwater, that applying those PLT chops to make a lisp for music (instead of lists or maps) or for gardening or recipe design is the greatest thing we can do and tacitly helps people.
Dancers and choreographers have Benesh and Laba notation. There is now a cooking notation!