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Spoken language is incredibly ambiguous. It's one thing to generate a drawing which can vary wildly in output and still be acceptable. It's another to specify

Spoken language is incredibly ambiguous. It's one thing to generate a drawing which can vary wildly in output and still be acceptable. It's another to specify something precisely to a computer. Working with non-programmers on a daily basis it is incredible how difficult it is to communicate even relatively simple things without confusion. So all the more power to them, but I am very skeptical. Especially since co-pilot has zero knowledge of the formal semantics of programming languages. This is a lot different than the half ass auto complete that it already does since that at least has some context.

singularity2001 4y ago
With copilot ambiguous language gets transformed into concrete syntax. If the implementation doesn't fit your ambiguous request, you should be able to refine … with ambiguous language. Theoretically this would create a "programming dialog" environment.
- nightski 4y ago
  So you are going to have to verbalize something, interpret the code, build a mental model of how it works, and then if it does not match what you want go back to step 1? That sounds exhausting when we have spent countless human years developing languages which let us communicate our intentions precisely to computers. If you don't do this there is no ambiguity detector. Meaning it's entirely possible for the computer to interpret what you are saying completely different than intended, yet it is a perfectly valid interpretation. So the only one who can qualify if it got it right is you.
tluyben2 4y ago
It's the same with copilot; you have to know how to implement things to implement things with copilot (for the most part), but when you are a programmer and you could write the code, then you know the prompt to write to generate 10+ lines of code for 1 comment of text all day long. Especially for data transformation, copilot has been a real magic tool; if you put in a comment: /* this functions transforms this json from: { ... some complex structure in json } to this json: { ... some different structure in json } */ ... copilot comes up with the function that takes in the first and spits out the latter. Even if the fieldnames do not match etc, it usually 'guesses' right what fits on what (so it does have some context from it's learning phase what 'looks alike' or 'might be the same thing'. Example: I had a structure with firstName: string, lastName: string and a target structure with name: string; it just did name: firstName+' '+lastName, which was indeed what I wanted. But it comes up with more intricate stuff as well that is pretty much surprising (too human basically). What is another bonus; if you generated function transfromAtoB(a: A) above, then you only have to do: /* do the reverse of function transfromAtoB, accept json structure B as input and return structure A */ And it'll come up with the reverse. It's not hard to write yourself, but it's boring and error prone (some of these structures are huge). Now I press tab a bunch of times, and run the tests to see if it worked. I am also not that worried i'm infringing someone's open source code; this is all way to custom to look like anything else. That's where this shines; things where it verbatim copies something, you should've been using a library anyway. Statically typing and using typescript definitely works better than other combinations I have tried (C# was pretty bad last I tried it, JS is good but often subtly wrong because of type issues).

singularity2001 4y ago

With copilot ambiguous language gets transformed into concrete syntax. If the implementation doesn't fit your ambiguous request, you should be able to refine … with ambiguous language. Theoretically this would create a "programming dialog" environment.

nightski 4y ago
So you are going to have to verbalize something, interpret the code, build a mental model of how it works, and then if it does not match what you want go back to step 1? That sounds exhausting when we have spent countless human years developing languages which let us communicate our intentions precisely to computers. If you don't do this there is no ambiguity detector. Meaning it's entirely possible for the computer to interpret what you are saying completely different than intended, yet it is a perfectly valid interpretation. So the only one who can qualify if it got it right is you.

tluyben2 4y ago

It's the same with copilot; you have to know how to implement things to implement things with copilot (for the most part), but when you are a programmer and you could write the code, then you know the prompt to write to generate 10+ lines of code for 1 comment of text all day long. Especially for data transformation, copilot has been a real magic tool; if you put in a comment: /* this functions transforms this json from: { ... some complex structure in json } to this json: { ... some different structure in json } */ ... copilot comes up with the function that takes in the first and spits out the latter. Even if the fieldnames do not match etc, it usually 'guesses' right what fits on what (so it does have some context from it's learning phase what 'looks alike' or 'might be the same thing'. Example: I had a structure with firstName: string, lastName: string and a target structure with name: string; it just did name: firstName+' '+lastName, which was indeed what I wanted. But it comes up with more intricate stuff as well that is pretty much surprising (too human basically). What is another bonus; if you generated function transfromAtoB(a: A) above, then you only have to do: /* do the reverse of function transfromAtoB, accept json structure B as input and return structure A */ And it'll come up with the reverse. It's not hard to write yourself, but it's boring and error prone (some of these structures are huge). Now I press tab a bunch of times, and run the tests to see if it worked. I am also not that worried i'm infringing someone's open source code; this is all way to custom to look like anything else. That's where this shines; things where it verbatim copies something, you should've been using a library anyway. Statically typing and using typescript definitely works better than other combinations I have tried (C# was pretty bad last I tried it, JS is good but often subtly wrong because of type issues).