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I'm a casual programmer, who knows enough to write decent Python scripts, but who is probably unaware of 99% of the Python library modules that have been writte
by PopePompus 4y ago
I'm a casual programmer, who knows enough to write decent Python scripts, but who is probably unaware of 99% of the Python library modules that have been written. Yesterday I had GPT-4 write a script that would accept the name of a star, and print out all the journal articles that have that star's name in the article title. This is a bit trickier than it sounds, because almost every interesting star has many names (Vega, for example, has more than 60 names, not including non-English names) and I wanted the script to check the titles for all the names that might be used for the particular star I had specified. I told GPT-4 to use the SIMBAD database to get all the star names, and to use NASA ADS to get all the publications. GPT-4 wrote a script to do that. The script was buggy, but I was able to fix the bugs easily and quickly. The wonderful thing was that GPT-4 used 2 different libraries that I had never even heard of, to pull data out of those databases. The process of producing the script was far faster than I would have been able to do on my own. Professional programmers may be well aware of the software packages that will allow them to do their jobs, and might not get much help from a GPT assistant. But I think for people who know how to program, but are not professionals and may not know "what's out there" in the way of resources, a GPT assistant will vastly increase their ability to use their programming skills (such as they are...) to get useful stuff done.