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Discussion on: What’s an unpopular software opinion you have?

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Graham Trott
  1. That the majority of programming problems - especially smaller ones - can be defined unambiguously in English. Not as concisely as computer code, of course, but if you go down that rabbit hole you end up in a land of impenetrable formulae.
  2. That if you and I can understand unambiguous English there's no good reason why a computer can't. This is 2019, after all, not 1965. We've spent all those years making computers cleverer (my phone can not only hear but understand me when I speak to it), but when faced with programming problems, instead of getting them to use our language we force ourselves to become machines and work with ever more complex computer languages. Which only a small minority can do, so maybe maintaining exclusivity has something to do with it.
  3. That when computers speak the language of their users, software is a whole lot more accessible (skin in the game) and reliable (more eyeballs, fewer bugs).

My 2¢.