Hacker News Reader

Comment by trashb | Hacker News Reader

> Edgar Dijkstra called it nearly 50 years ago: we will never be programming in English, or French, or Spanish. Natural languages have not evolved to be precise enough and unambiguous enough. Semantic ambiguity and language entropy will always defeat this ambition.

This is the most important quote for any AI coding discussion.

Anyone that doesn't understand how the tools they use came to be is doomed to reinvent them.

> The folly of many people now claiming that “prompts are the new source code”,

These are the same people that create applications in MS Excel.

View on HN

Further evidence: After all these years (far longer than we have been doing programming), we still don't do math in English or French or Spanish. We do it in carefully defined formal notations.

But so many problems (programming, but also physics and math) start as informal word problems. A major skill is being able to turn the informal into something formal and precise.

> These are the same people that create applications in MS Excel.

Ones that want their application to work? :) the last piece of software you should be knocking is MS Excel, in my 30+ year career the one common thread just about everywhere I worked (or contracted at) has used Excel to run some amazing sh*t

Everywhere I've worked as a software engineer the past 30 years I've seen Excel spreadsheets but rarely anything amazing, maybe once back in the 1990's at one place by an Excel guru but those are rare. 00% of the time Excel is used to make essentially table layouts of data maybe with some simple cell calculations.

I dunno much but I do know that if you can start a business that replaces Excel spreadsheets with an application(s) that your business builds you'd be the World's first trillionaire (many "tri" over) :)

Excel (or similar spreadsheet programs) is indeed great and has it's place. There are certain area's where there is no real replacement which is impressive. However I think that creating (interactive) applications is not one of the jobs Excel is the best tool for the job.

This exactly the argument I try to make Excel (spreadsheets) is a great interface for processing and working with certain type of data, think economic etc. but it is not great for other things. There we need a different interface to efficiently communicate our intent. For example programming languages or even writing a novel would not work very well in a Excel sheet (though no doubt someone has attempted it).

I think programmets often underestimate the power of Excel for non-programmers, it in practice runs the business world.

I think that it also is a comparable to the ai side we see now. Do something for real, use real database or programmer. Non-programmer needs something, vibe code or excel

> Natural languages have not evolved to be precise enough and unambiguous enough.

Are they?

I feel like AIs fill in a lot of the blanks with reasonable assumptions rather than the input being precise

English is poor language in terms of preciseness - and even worse in terms of impreciseness.

Sometimes it looks like about anything else would be better as a programming interface.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com