Natural language can be ambiguous, though. "The system should email the customer when their subscription renews." When? Which timezone? What should we email t

Natural language can be ambiguous, though. "The system should email the customer when their subscription renews." When? Which timezone? What should we email them? Which email address (the customer changed their email 10 minutes ago, the address at time of the charge?) I can look at a page of code and answer those questions pretty quickly. You could write all of those in plain English, but then there are more tiny flaws in the ambiguous language. Maybe we could standardize the language in some way. To reduce ambiguity we start using keywords. When we want to refer to the same thing twice we create a variable or a type. Two things must interleave, let's create concurrency primitives. To check that the prompt is correct, we can write a test for it. And maybe we DO end up with a different format of prompting that supplies this, but at some point we are still giving directions to computers. If those directions are lossy, the system runs differently every time (which I've noticed is bad for building good software).