[G_Morgan]

The bosses instructions and confused and imprecise. The natural language dance in this scenario involves us repeatedly trying and failing and adding more communication until the various terms being used are precisely defined enough so that the software can be written.

This is what Dijkstra was talking about. That without a formal system we end up wasting a lot of time tightening up what we mean.

It may be an interesting field to see if we can make a computer do this dance but it isn't useful.

[timelinex]

The current process is: Bosses tells you the programmer and then you instruct the computer precisely. With natural language programming, the boss just tells the computer. There is no you now. Why is this faster? Because you used to take 3 months to get the sofware done, our new system can do it in 3 seconds[the times are arbitary, the general assumption is that it's less than a human].

Of course you are going to still have to specify what you want with both NLP and a human. So this time is constant and it is not relevant when comparing the two system.

What I'm saying is that the NLP would be like a human but faster and less error prone.

[netcan]

An interesting point is that programming a human computer is in itself an acquired skill.

A "boss" with years of experience instructing programmers will get better results than an amateur. Experience with the particular programmer also improves results. An important part of this is knowing what to specify and what to leave to the programmer.

Like you started off saying, looking at this as a way of making programming easier for people who can't currently program is probably wrong. It's possibly useful as something to paddle towards, but I suspect it isn't a genuine raison d'etre.