Unverified50% confidenceFactExact time
What Dijkstra opposed was using natural language itself as a programming language, not describing requirements in natural language.
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10/23/2026
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UnverifiedSome commenters believe that when Dijkstra was writing, machines' ability to understand natural language was essentially zero, whereas today large models can handle ambiguity and context to a considerable degree, so EWD667 criticizes "treating natural language as a substitute," and the more realistic current approach is "natural language as the interface, formal verification as the safeguard."75% similarUnverifiedThe ambiguity, implicit premises, and context-dependency of natural language cannot always be cleanly mapped to first-order logic, which is a translation boundary challenge for this architecture.67% similarUnverifiedNatural language programming lowers the cognitive threshold for programming from mastering syntactic rules to clearly expressing requirements.66% similarUnverifiedUnder the constrained operation language design, the normalizer that used future information became fundamentally inexpressible at the language level.65% similar
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