ramesh was here

"Anyways, this rant has been going on long enough. I would like the make clear the theme I am trying to convey. Fear is the death of agility. If you have to second guess yourself, or feel restricted in how you can approach building a solution, the solution will suffer. If you are afraid at the consequences your software will have, you will fail unless you contain an inhuman capacity for mental anguish. Sketch, re-conceive, evolve all of your code. Make it better, even if others are relying upon it. Communicate with them how things are changing and work with them to reconcile those changes with their applications. Revolution is hard, evolution is easy, but use both to grow your code and make it more beautiful."

As a result of the educational trend away from intellectual discipline, the last decades have shown in the Western world a sharp decline of people's mastery of their own language: many people that by the standards of a previous generation should know better, are no longer able to use their native tongue effectively, even for purposes for which it is pretty adequate. (You have only to look at the indeed alarming amount of on close reading meaningless verbiage in scientific articles, technical reports, government publications etc.) This phenomenon --known as 'The New Illiteracy'-- should discourage those believers in natural language programming that lack the technical insight needed to predict its failure. (End of remark.)

From one gut feeling I derive much consolation: I suspect that machines to be programmed in our native tongues --be it Dutch, English, American, French, German, or Swahili-- are as damned difficult to make as they would be to use.