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by ihodes
87 days ago
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I agree that programming language can be a better (denser, more precise) encapsulator of intent than natural language. But the converse is more often true; natural language is a denser and more precise encapsulator of intent than programming language. I think there's some irony in using Russell's quote being used this way. My intent will often be less clear to a reader once encoded in a language bound inextricably to a machine's execution context. Good abstraction meaningfully whittles away at this mismatch, and DSLs in powerful languages (like ML-family and lisp-family languages) have often mirrored natural(ish) language. Observe that programming languages themselves have natural language specifications that are meaningfully more dense than their implementations, and often govern multiple implementations. Code isn't just code. Some code encapsulates intent in a meaningfully information and meaning-dense way: that code is indeed poetry, and perhaps the best representation of intent available. Some code, like nearly every line of the code that backs your server vs client time example, is an implementation detail. The Electric Clojure version is a far better encapsulation of intent (https://electric.hyperfiddle.net/fiddle/electric-tutorial.tw...). A natural language version, executed in the context of a program with an existing client server architecture, is likely best: "show a live updated version of the servers' unix epoch timestamp and the client's, and below that show the skew between them." Given that we started with Russell, we could end with Wittgenstein's "Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn't the indistinct one often exactly what we need?" |
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The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.
— Edsger Dijkstra