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Comment by casey2 | Hacker News Reader

Programming languages are natural and ambiguous too, what does READ mean? you have to look it up to see the types. The power comes from the fact that it's audit-able, but that you don't need to audit it every time you want to write some code. You think you write good code? try to prove it after the compiler gets through with it.

Natural languages are richer in ideas, it may be harder to get working code going from a purely natural description to code, than code to code, but you don't gain much from just translating code. One is only limited by your imagination the other already exists, you could just call it as a routine.

You only have a SENSE for good code because it's a natural language with conventions and shared meaning. If the goal of programming is to learn to communicate better as humans then we should be fighting ambiguity not running from it. 100 years from now nobody is going to understand that your conventions were actually "good code".

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> Programming languages are natural and ambiguous too

Programming languages work because they are artificial (small, constrained, often based on algebraic and arithmetic expressions, boolean logic, etc.) and have generally well-defined semantics. This is what enables reliable compilers and interpreters to be constructed.

Exactly. Programming is the art of removing ambiguity and making it formal. And it's why the timelines between getting an EXACT plan of what I need to implement vs hazy requirements are so out of whack.

> Programming languages are natural and ambiguous too, what does READ mean?

"READ" is part of the "documentation in natural language". The compiler ignores it entirely, it's not part of the programming language per se. It is pure documentation for the developers, and it is ambiguous.

But the part that the compiler actually reads is non-ambiguous. It cannot deal with ambiguity, fundamentally. It cannot infer from the context that you wrote a line of code that is actually ironic, and it should therefore execute the opposite.

> Programming languages are natural and ambiguous too, what does READ mean?

Not nearly in the same sense actual language is ambiguous.

And ambiguity in programming is usually a bad thing, whereas in language it can usually be intended.

Good code, whatever that means, can read like a book. Event-driven architectures is a good example because the context of how something came to be is right in the event name itself.

What is good code now is only good code because of the bad programming languages we’ve had to accept for the last hundred years because we’re tied to incremental improvements. We’re tied to static brittle types. But look at natural systems - they all use dynamic “languages.” When you get a cut, your flesh doesn’t throw an exception because it’s connected to the wrong “thing.” Maybe AI will redefine what good code means, because it’s better able to handle ambiguity.

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