Dijkstra’s EWD667 challenges the assumption that replacing formal notation with natural language automatically makes programming easier for people. An interface adds coordination and communication costs rather than merely dividing a fixed amount of work, so increasing the machine’s burden may not reduce the user’s. He presents formal notation as a tool for exposing mistakes and meaningless statements through simple rules. University bibliographic records date the book containing the 1978 summer-school contribution to 1979. This is a historical argument about interfaces and specifications, not an experimental finding about modern LLMs.