Article by Darryl Taft for The New Stack
English is not a Programming Language
In which Darryl Taft writes about the idea that English is becoming the most popular programming language. Intellyx’s Eric Newcomer takes an opposing view, arguing that English is not a programming language.
It’s understandable. Developers are using gen AI prompts to develop many different types of computer applications in many different computer languages.
But this doesn’t make English a programming language such as COBOL, or Python, or RUST. In fact gen Ai generates programming language code in response to English language prompts, because English is not executable.
When using gen AI, the quality of the prompts determines the quality of the output.
People are, in other words, are still modifying human language based on what the computer understands. Which is, after all, the reason programming languages exist in the first place.
