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No, my point is not that programming languages are obsolete. Rather that they are shifting one layer down. Just like there is room for different virtual machine
by abraxas 4y ago
No, my point is not that programming languages are obsolete. Rather that they are shifting one layer down. Just like there is room for different virtual machines today (eg. JVM vs V8 etc) there will be room for different computer languages. They just won't be used primarily as a way to write code but rather as an intermediate representation. Just like you rarely need to look at raw Java bytecode or transpiled Javascript you will rarely look at raw Python or Rust code. Those will be human readable but rarely read by humans intermediate representations provided by LLM augmented 5th generation programming tools.
- QuadrupleA 4y agoIt's an interesting thought - but with the imprecise/random nature of LLMs, I wonder if we could tolerate something so inherently faulty / unreliable / human-like in place of a compiler. If real compilers spit out subtle machine language bugs / mistranslations of code even 1% of the time, we'd be in big trouble.
- abraxas 4y agoThis may be at least partially circumvented by lowering the temperature of token generation. Otherwise, a strong set of tests should be generated to minimize the impact. The tooling is going to look very different. Every time we move up an abstraction layer we give up some guarantees from the underlying platform. The move to the cloud forced us to give up on having deterministic hardware. This is going to be a shift in that same direction. The lack of determinism causes problems to be sure but the payback is so great that it's likely to be a worthy tradeoff.