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I somewhat disagree with this. In real life, say in some company, the inception of an idea for a new feature is made in the head of some business person. This p

I somewhat disagree with this. In real life, say in some company, the inception of an idea for a new feature is made in the head of some business person. This person will not speak any formal language. So however you turn it, some translation from natural language to machine language will have to be done to implement the feature. Typically the first step, translation from natural to formal language, will be done by business analysts and programmers. But why not try to let computers help along the way?

chilldsgn 2y ago
I like your take. The only issue I have with trusting a computer to do so much is that it doesn't necessarily have the long term vision or intuition some humans might have for the direction of the software product. There's so much nuance to the connection between a business need and getting it into software, or maybe I am overthinking it :D
delusional 2y ago
I don't think youre fully comprehending Dijkstra's argument. He's not saying to not use tool to help with translation, he is saying that not thinking in terms of formal symbols HURTS THINKING. Your ideas are worse if you don't think in formal systems. If you don't treat your thoughts as formal things. In your example, he has no opinion on how to translate the idea of a "business person" because in his view the ideas of the "business person" are already shallow and bad because they don't follow a formalism. They are not worth translating.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  If that's correct, then it's very falsifiable. If a businessperson says "there's a gap in the market - let's build X" they will be following a formalism at their level of detail. They see the market, the interactions between existing products and customers, and where things might be going. Just because they can't spell it out to the nth degree doesn't matter. Their formalism is "this is what the market would like". Having an LLM then tease out details - "what should happen in this case" would actually be pretty useful.
  - delusional 2y ago
    You're either not really thinking through what you're saying, or you're being disingenuous because you want to promote AI. A formalism isn't "person says Y". It's about adhering to a structure, to a form of reasoning. Mathematical formalism is about adhering to the structure of mathematics, and making whatever argument you desire to make in the formal structure of formulas and equations. Saying "A palindrome is a word that reads the same backwards as it does forwards" is not a formal definition. Saying "Let r(x) be the function that when given a string x returns the reversed string, x is then a palindrome iff x = r(x)" (sans the formal definitions of the function r). Formalism is about reducing the set of axioms (the base assumptions of your formal system) to the minimal set that is required to build all other (provable) arguments. It's not vague hand waving about what some market wants, it's naturally extrapolating from a small set of axioms, and being rigorous if ever to add new ones. If your hypothetical "business person" every says "it was decided" then they are not speaking a formal language, because formalism does not have deciders.
nightfly 2y ago
The first step isn't from natural language to formal language. It's from the idea in your head into natural language. Getting that step right in a way that a computer could hope to turn into a useful thing is hard.
- falcor84 2y ago
  Without descending fully into epistemology, I tend to think that there is no proper "idea" in your head before it's phrased in language - the act of initially describing something in natural language *is* the act of generating it.
  - antonvs 2y ago
    Research on LLMs suggest that's probably not the case. See the work on reasoning in latent space, and on shared concepts between languages being represented independently of the individual language. Of course one might argue that even if LLMs are capable of ideation and conceptualisation without natural language, doesn't mean humans are. But the fact that up to 50% of people have no inner monologue seems to refute that.
    - card_zero 2y ago
      Humans can't share ideas directly, they pass through language. Some idea is created at the other end, nominally the same one, but there's no reason to suppose a universal internal format. Even translating between human languages loses details, where words in one language map imperfectly to words in another. Moving ideas directly from one brain to another probably can't happen. So the statement in language doesn't map very well to the idea (whichever person's version of the idea). And at some point before the idea is formed there has to be some sort of proto-idea or potential, with less definite boundaries. So "there is no proper idea" sounds right to me. There's something idiosyncratic, not the formal idea that's frozen when put into words.
      - antonvs 2y ago
        Sure, you can define "proper" and "idea" to the claim post-facto to change what's being claimed, but the point is we do have ideas without language, and converting into language is not creating the idea.
nottorp 2y ago
Say, doesn't each business - each activity - have its own formal language? Not as formalized as programming languages, but it's there. Try to define any process, you end up with something trending towards formalized even if you don't realize it.
- skydhash 2y ago
  That's pretty much the whole basis of Domain Driven Design. The core message is to get to an Ubiquitous Language which is the formalization of the business jargon (pretty much a glossary). From which the code can then be derived naturally.
  - nottorp 2y ago
    > From which the code can then be derived naturally. Disagree with "naturally". Unless you want to end up on accidentally quadratic. Or on accidentally exponential if there's such a list.
    - skydhash 2y ago
      Optimization is dependent on the technical aspect of the implementation. Ultimately, it is going to be a computer that's going to execute the program and it has its own constraints. Reconciling the domain and the execution platform is where the programmer expertise comes in.
James_K 2y ago
Because then you don't know what the computer's doing. The whole point of this article was that there is value in the process of writing your ideas out formally. If you "let computers help you along the way", you'll run straight into the issue of needing an increasingly formal natural language to get sufficiently good results from the machine.
kmacdough 2y ago
Computers can and should help along the way, but Dijkstra's argument is that a) much of the challenge of human ideas is discovered in the act of converting from natural to formal language and b) that this act, in and of itself, is what trains our formal logical selves. So he's contesting not only the idea that programs should be specified in natural language, but also the idea that removing our need to understand the formal language would increase our ability to build complex systems. It's worth noting that much of the "translation" is not translation, but fixing the logical ambiguities, inconsistencies and improper assumptions. Much of it can happen in natural language, if we take Dijkstra seriously, precisely because programmers at the table who have spent their lives formalizing. There are other professions which require significant formal thinking, such as math. But also, the conversion of old proofs into computer proofs has lead us to discover holes and gaps in many well accepted proofs. Not that much has been overturned, but we still do t have a complete proof for Fermats last theorem [1]. [1] https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2024/12/11/fermats-last-theorem-how-its-going/ https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2024/12/11/fermats-last-th...
- nelgaard 2y ago
  But even real translation is bad. There has been some efforts to make computer languages with local (non-english) keywords. Most have fortunately already failed horribly. But it still exists, e.g. in spreadsheet formulas. In some cases even number formatting (decimal separators) are affected.

chilldsgn 2y ago

I like your take. The only issue I have with trusting a computer to do so much is that it doesn't necessarily have the long term vision or intuition some humans might have for the direction of the software product. There's so much nuance to the connection between a business need and getting it into software, or maybe I am overthinking it :D

delusional 2y ago

I don't think youre fully comprehending Dijkstra's argument. He's not saying to not use tool to help with translation, he is saying that not thinking in terms of formal symbols HURTS THINKING. Your ideas are worse if you don't think in formal systems. If you don't treat your thoughts as formal things. In your example, he has no opinion on how to translate the idea of a "business person" because in his view the ideas of the "business person" are already shallow and bad because they don't follow a formalism. They are not worth translating.

robertlagrant 2y ago
If that's correct, then it's very falsifiable. If a businessperson says "there's a gap in the market - let's build X" they will be following a formalism at their level of detail. They see the market, the interactions between existing products and customers, and where things might be going. Just because they can't spell it out to the nth degree doesn't matter. Their formalism is "this is what the market would like". Having an LLM then tease out details - "what should happen in this case" would actually be pretty useful.
- delusional 2y ago
  You're either not really thinking through what you're saying, or you're being disingenuous because you want to promote AI. A formalism isn't "person says Y". It's about adhering to a structure, to a form of reasoning. Mathematical formalism is about adhering to the structure of mathematics, and making whatever argument you desire to make in the formal structure of formulas and equations. Saying "A palindrome is a word that reads the same backwards as it does forwards" is not a formal definition. Saying "Let r(x) be the function that when given a string x returns the reversed string, x is then a palindrome iff x = r(x)" (sans the formal definitions of the function r). Formalism is about reducing the set of axioms (the base assumptions of your formal system) to the minimal set that is required to build all other (provable) arguments. It's not vague hand waving about what some market wants, it's naturally extrapolating from a small set of axioms, and being rigorous if ever to add new ones. If your hypothetical "business person" every says "it was decided" then they are not speaking a formal language, because formalism does not have deciders.

nightfly 2y ago

The first step isn't from natural language to formal language. It's from the idea in your head into natural language. Getting that step right in a way that a computer could hope to turn into a useful thing is hard.

falcor84 2y ago
Without descending fully into epistemology, I tend to think that there is no proper "idea" in your head before it's phrased in language - the act of initially describing something in natural language *is* the act of generating it.
- antonvs 2y ago
  Research on LLMs suggest that's probably not the case. See the work on reasoning in latent space, and on shared concepts between languages being represented independently of the individual language. Of course one might argue that even if LLMs are capable of ideation and conceptualisation without natural language, doesn't mean humans are. But the fact that up to 50% of people have no inner monologue seems to refute that.
  - card_zero 2y ago
    Humans can't share ideas directly, they pass through language. Some idea is created at the other end, nominally the same one, but there's no reason to suppose a universal internal format. Even translating between human languages loses details, where words in one language map imperfectly to words in another. Moving ideas directly from one brain to another probably can't happen. So the statement in language doesn't map very well to the idea (whichever person's version of the idea). And at some point before the idea is formed there has to be some sort of proto-idea or potential, with less definite boundaries. So "there is no proper idea" sounds right to me. There's something idiosyncratic, not the formal idea that's frozen when put into words.
    - antonvs 2y ago
      Sure, you can define "proper" and "idea" to the claim post-facto to change what's being claimed, but the point is we do have ideas without language, and converting into language is not creating the idea.

nottorp 2y ago

Say, doesn't each business - each activity - have its own formal language? Not as formalized as programming languages, but it's there. Try to define any process, you end up with something trending towards formalized even if you don't realize it.

skydhash 2y ago
That's pretty much the whole basis of Domain Driven Design. The core message is to get to an Ubiquitous Language which is the formalization of the business jargon (pretty much a glossary). From which the code can then be derived naturally.
- nottorp 2y ago
  > From which the code can then be derived naturally. Disagree with "naturally". Unless you want to end up on accidentally quadratic. Or on accidentally exponential if there's such a list.
  - skydhash 2y ago
    Optimization is dependent on the technical aspect of the implementation. Ultimately, it is going to be a computer that's going to execute the program and it has its own constraints. Reconciling the domain and the execution platform is where the programmer expertise comes in.

James_K 2y ago

Because then you don't know what the computer's doing. The whole point of this article was that there is value in the process of writing your ideas out formally. If you "let computers help you along the way", you'll run straight into the issue of needing an increasingly formal natural language to get sufficiently good results from the machine.

kmacdough 2y ago

Computers can and should help along the way, but Dijkstra's argument is that a) much of the challenge of human ideas is discovered in the act of converting from natural to formal language and b) that this act, in and of itself, is what trains our formal logical selves. So he's contesting not only the idea that programs should be specified in natural language, but also the idea that removing our need to understand the formal language would increase our ability to build complex systems. It's worth noting that much of the "translation" is not translation, but fixing the logical ambiguities, inconsistencies and improper assumptions. Much of it can happen in natural language, if we take Dijkstra seriously, precisely because programmers at the table who have spent their lives formalizing. There are other professions which require significant formal thinking, such as math. But also, the conversion of old proofs into computer proofs has lead us to discover holes and gaps in many well accepted proofs. Not that much has been overturned, but we still do t have a complete proof for Fermats last theorem [1]. [1] https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2024/12/11/fermats-last-theorem-how-its-going/ https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2024/12/11/fermats-last-th...

nelgaard 2y ago
But even real translation is bad. There has been some efforts to make computer languages with local (non-english) keywords. Most have fortunately already failed horribly. But it still exists, e.g. in spreadsheet formulas. In some cases even number formatting (decimal separators) are affected.