[Kim_Bruning]

I figure english is the next coolest programming language for scripting and compilation. So far people have been writing fun little demos with it, but now people are starting to place real demands on it, and you're starting to see actual programs needing to be built. Unsurprisingly this requires a bit more craft.

[oblio]

> I figure english is the next coolest programming language for scripting and compilation. So far people have been writing fun little demos with it, but now people are starting to place real demands on it, and you're starting to see actual programs needing to be built. Unsurprisingly this requires a bit more craft.

Perhaps that craft of using the exact subset of English has something to do with the correct selection of words and concise, yet expressive enough, expressions, in a fashion resembling creating a code.

A code that's meant to be understood by machines, we could call it "computer code". And said computer code could be used to create recipes, algorithms, let's call them "programs". Hey, I think I have ideas for 2 possible names for this process!

[Kim_Bruning]

No wait, you think I'm being silly so that's why you're being a bit sarcastic back.

But seriously, you can put a shebang on an english text file now (if you're sufficiently brave), or feed it through something that spits out code on the other end (so you can proof read the consequences before executing them).

It's crazy, but this is 2026, and that actually ... just works. You can even do it locally, if you don't mind running a space heater.

Thing is, when you have the expressiveness and power of a full natural language (and you're already paying for it), why would you want to constrain yourself to a subset? That's not very practical. Why not use all of it? Computing was never about typing code into machines anyway. "Computer" used to be a human profession, until it got automated.

On the upside, there's thousands of years of documentation. On the downside, a lot said documentation is underspecified and/or straight wishful thinking. It's certainly an interesting avenue to explore.

[oblio]

> why would you want to constrain yourself to a subset? That's not very practical. Why not use all of it?

For the same reason math, physics, chemistry, etc figured out a long time ago that Koine Greek, Latin, French, German, English, etc aren't the best languages for science. Constraint gives focus, precision.

If you code novels, knock yourself out.

[Kim_Bruning]

Let's actually look at this as if I'm serious for a second? Tell me this framing really can't work.

None-exhaustively:

Python has if, for, while, def, class and first class lists, dicts , functions ;

Forth has this stack machine concept, RPN, compilation-in-the-REPL when defining new functions.

Lisp has this code is data is code concept, and CAR, CDR, first class lists (obviously ), first class functions (in some of them) ... etc.

Machine code can (theoretically) be directly expressed in logic gates.

How about a quick look at what English supports:

Conditionals, iteration, abstraction, composition, delegation, exception handling, scope, naming, modularity; intent, priority, graduated precision, analogy, context-dependence; And.. the concept of semantic triples is built in as a syntactic primitive (subject-predicate-object), so you can even do a bunch of GOFAI right off the bat.

It's weird thinking of english as a programming language. But it kind of works like one if you want to, and computers can process it now?

[oblio]

I'm not saying English (or any other natural language) is not usable. It is, since it's a more complex language than programming language. All natural languages are supersets of current programming languages.

I'm talking about the opposite problem: these supersets are ambiguous, contradictory, vague. At the end of the day the thing that is programmed needs to be clear, unambiguous and ideally concise, too (performance in its million incarnations).

So yeah, I guess you can fix the ambiguous aspect with verbosity. Just write more words until you define everything you need to define more directly when using a formal language.

I would be extremely shocked if programming wouldn't require knowing a very specific, albeit huge, domain jargon.

[Kim_Bruning]

Question isn't per-se "is English a great language to write the next sorting algorithm in?" . Probably not. Rust is quicker , and cheaper to execute besides. But there's entire classes of problem that English might be more useful for.

English assumes the target is an agent with memory/state in a given context. Ambiguity, verbosity, noise is strongly reduced by means of modelling the other agent's state, then only transmitting the required state diff. The receiver decodes by comparing the diff against the other side's predicted state and updating. [1] This kind of protocol would obviously be NUTS to build from scratch if you went about it as an engineer I'd think. But we have the hardware and software preinstalled in humans , and now my 3090 can run an (imperfect, but viable) decoder

Is it useful? Yeah, I think it actually is. English is able to encode things that are ambiguous, contradictory, vague... and get useful results. Not always; maybe not even often. As you say, skill required, but the option is there. Formal languages just crash.

It's interesting is what I'd call it.

[1] see also: Clark & Brennan's grounding theory in linguistics; Predictive coding in neuroscience; Delta encoding in compression; and Theory of mind in cognitive science. They all dance around the same shape, so this is roughly accurate I think.

[Kim_Bruning]

In a semi-random sample of 10 recent articles on arxiv.org, 10 articles (100%) contained english language as the predominant part of the corpus. Where necessary mathematical notation was included.

So - you're not wrong that eg. mathematical notation is (often) used, as we both very well know. But English is really quite prominent!

And now computers can process both, where before they couldn't.

The engineering doesn't go away, not yet. Decomposition, abstraction, state management, blast radius containment O:-) . But now you can express much more of that in the language the arxiv papers are already written in.

[simonw]

> But seriously, you can put a shebang on an english text file now (if you're sufficiently brave)

That inspired me to figure out how to do exactly that:

https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/llm-shebang

  #!/usr/bin/env -S llm -f
  Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle

Thanks for the inspiration!

[wfurney]

A .llm file extension might be in order :)

[Kim_Bruning]

Oh, that looks pretty clean!

[oblio]

> But seriously, you can put a shebang on an english text file now (if you're sufficiently brave), or feed it through something that spits out code on the other end (so you can proof read the consequences before executing them).

The funky thing is that it's not just English. I could vibe code in Romanian, it would probably be hilarious :-)) Probably not for whomever would have to take over the app, though.

[Kim_Bruning]

Eh? You should go for it! Do everything at least once, right? Pick some simple pet project, and get it off your bucket list!

If it wasn't on your bucket list to begin with, who cares: Now you can add it and complete it in one fell swoop ;-)