> Isn’t the issue that most programmers know what to avoid, and yet they make mistakes when writing code anyway. There's some dose of truth to this, but the st

> Isn’t the issue that most programmers know what to avoid, and yet they make mistakes when writing code anyway. There's some dose of truth to this, but the statement requires further elaboration to illustrate the complete picture. Programmers understand informally and intuitively what to avoid, yet we make serious mistakes when writing code anyway, because we are all stuck at the prerigorous[0] stage of understanding programming languages. Unfortunately, so long as our languages don't have a formal semantics, there is no way to reach the rigorous stage, let alone the postrigorous stage. (There is no path connecting the prerigorous and postrigorous stages that doesn't pass through the rigorous stage.) [0] https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/there%E2%80%99s-more-to-mathematics-than-rigour-and-proofs/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/there%E2%80%99s... . > Seems to me like safe languages is the real solution to this Safe languages are one solution, perhaps the most useful one in the vast majority of cases. However, legitimate use cases for unsafe languages do exist, and we need workable solutions for those cases. That being said, I don't think an informal English document could be such a solution.