Possibly relevant:

The experiment in designing a language that resembled natural languages (English and Japanese) was not successful. -[1]- William R. Cook, AppleScript, HOPL IV

Now our new LLMs are different, because they don't use "language the resembled natural languages", but actual natural language. But the lesson is instructive nevertheless, because it gives us some empirical evidence to compare to Dijkstra's theoretical arguments.

And this is that natural language is at best a two-edged sword. Yes, there are benefits, but there are also huge drawbacks. And one problem is that the benefits are front-loaded and the drawbacks are long-term problems.

To me, one thing we are missing is that what LLMs do for us actually has 2 parts.

1. It allows us to use natural language, allowing us to be fuzzy.

2. It allows us to specify what we want at a much, much higher level than usual.

With our LLMs, these two are intrinsically linked. I think the whole would be much, much more valuable if we could separate them.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1238844.1238845