Comment by whateverboat

I think when the the SICP authors said

> “Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.”

people probably did not realise what it meant, but AI is bringing it to forefront. Huge amount of work we do is essentially to communicate decisions we want to take, are going to take or have taken. It is a cornerstone of our society when people are continuously exposed to the relevant decisions which are taken in order to build a shared understanding and move forward.

Programming was nothing but that. We did not have a good enough compiler till now and we definitely do not have a good enough language to describe what we need (mostly because thoughts and world in general are so much more complex than any language). And therefore, we used the same language for computer to execute our code and for us to read and understand it. But the reason we store our code in human readable language and not machine code is because we want to communicate the code to future self.

That's why Elon musks's statement about just directly getting a binary makes no sense, because the language used to specify that binary needs to be stored in some engineering records anyway, and then "that is the code".

Code review is also exactly the same, it is a signal which says, "I want to take this decision, are you okay with us taking this decision?" and everyone interested signs off.

Bugs finding are just people going, "I completely agree with the principle of the decision but this particular part of decision is anti-thetic to the principle, should we fix it?"