All of these AI coding advocates talking about creating good docs and APIs, yes, please. Programming in natural language? OK, let my ADHD take you somewhere unexpected.

Larry Wall studied linguistics at Berkeley with the intent of discovering an unwritten language on a Christian mission to Africa and developing a written language for it. For health reasons, he couldn't make the trip and stayed in the US where he joined the JPL and created Perl. I worked with Larry at craigslist and attended many Perl conferences where he spoke. One of the guiding principles of the design of the language was natural language. I'm probably misquoting, but the phrase I remember was, he wanted "a language that mimicked the sloppiness and unpredictability of natural language so it could grow with you." I happen to love Perl because of this. Some of my earliest contributions to perlmonks.org were Perl Poetry [1](https://perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=40275), [2](https://perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=37997).

What's it got to do with AI? Whenever I hear someone explain to me they want to use natural language to write code, I think of Larry and Perl. I posted this story and asked "Can someone explain to me how using AI generated code is better than Perl?" And now none of the AI people want to talk to me!

#fuck_ai #ai #fuck_with_ai #perl