If so, then they don't actually have a product. Which -I guess- is what you're saying. I'm worried you might be right. Even though Claude is otherwise really good.
I’d say there is a product there, what remains to be seen IMO is whether the market will bear whatever the price of that product ends up being once Anthropic are finished changing their terms, pricing, and rules of engagement every several weeks…
This is actually surprisingly bad for a lot of people. It'll certainly drive down claude usage; which -presumably- is the idea. But maybe more than they'd like.
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.
> 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!
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Scissors tend to be reasonably straightforward, so there your analogy seems to hold, but upgrading to chopsticks, needles, and chainsaws tends to attract increasing amounts of "you're doing it wrong" in increasingly alarmed tones of voice.
I still miss both proper context menus and adjust-clicking in them to get things done without needing to thread the same hierarchy umpteen times. I've had arguments with people over this! My comeback: "You just haven't seen it done right!" :-P
They distinguish between running the application and opening a document or view. Not all applications want or need to have a document or view (onto a document or otherwise) open at all times. Some of the demo programs actually demonstrate this. Eg, iirc !maestro can keep playing with window open or closed.
Mac OS X has a variant. There's a little dot below the icons that indicate that the program is currently active in ram versus just visible in the dock.
Ps: wrt the demo programs. Did you notice you can eg. 'Save' files from !Edit and !Paint directly into !Draw (and IIRC also back into itself) ?
Note that RISC OS had to contend with running off floppy disks too. So you might start one application off one floppy disk, and the next off another, and you'd have them both in ram, but neither had any data in them yet, because that might come of a third floppy disk.
That's at least one concrete scenario where "application loaded" need not be the same thing as "having data open in a window".
It's been a while though. I just know they were extremely consistent in keeping the distinction between "application loaded" on one hand and opening a window on the other (or taking over the screen, in games) . This does help with your mental model of where your RAM is going, since you have a limited amount of it. Closing applications might free up ram you need for something, but now you might need to juggle floppies again. And so it went.
ppps
Also, windows (and some of mac os) seems to confuse opening a file with opening an application. It's not the same thing. An application can have 0, 1, or infinity files open in memory at any one time. "Why the heck does eg ms windows always open nonsensical empty windows when there's nothing to show?" I'm not sure it's a hill I'd die on today, but I used to have Opinions on this! "The window is not the application, an application can have lots of windows!" (Ha, you're reminding me of old rants back from decades ago ;-) )
I think the part I keep forgetting is the "Menu" mouse button. In the RISC OS case, having the application icon in the Icon Bar is, effectively, like having the application "foreground and running." A "Menu"-click on the icon parallels having, say, a MacOS 7.5 application running with its menu visible at the top of the screen. The Mac puts it more "in your face" but either way the ability to open the application menu and start a new document is essentially equivalent in both cases.
I'm reminded of the utility !Menon that I used to keep track of all my important files across many floppies, once upon a time. No window at all IIRC. Just drag and drop, and the Menu button.
Author here. This is strange, as I only use the Ghost site itself for hosting. I don't do any self-hosting or anything. Until this week, I'd never heard of anyone having troubles, but over on Reddit I saw a long-time reader getting some kind of SSL error, then later it said the site "wasn't available". Now in that thread someone else is getting that "phishing" error.
Time to get ahold of Ghost tech support and see what's going on. Sorry for the troubles!
The SSL error is likely from visitors on networks that use network-level blocking of domains that have been flagged as malicious. When visiting such a site over unencrypted HTTP you get redirected to an error page that explains the problem, but of course the network can't do this over HTTPS (by design), so you instead just get an opaque protocol error. (The specifics of the error message actually lead me to suspect that they might just be shoving the HTTP error-page response into the HTTPS connection, never mind that it's the wrong protocol.)
It's possible that putting your site behind Cloudflare and enabling Encrypted Client Hello might fix this, though I haven't tested it.
Unfortunately even a managed host like Ghost doesn't have much ability to help you with this particular problem; your particular site is treated as its own separate thing in malicious-site databases. (Since, after all, there's nothing stopping a bad guy from hosting a phishing site on a ghost.io subdomain.)
Maybe more relatable to the typical HN reader: You know when the top boss tells the lower bosses stuff, who then tells the lower bosses something and once it reaches you as an IC it's all different and corrupted compared to what it initially was? LLMs have the same effect, unsurprisingly.
reply