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This reminds me of something Dijkstra wrote almost 50 years ago in On the foolishness of "natural language programming [1]: > When all is said and told, the "n
by insign_bit 2y ago
This reminds me of something Dijkstra wrote almost 50 years ago in On the foolishness of "natural language programming [1]:
> When all is said and told, the "naturalness" with which we use our native tongues boils down to the ease with which we can use them for making statements the nonsense of which is not obvious.
Although this is obviously not about LLMs, its astonishing how many parallels can be drawn to today's usage of AI systems.
1: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...
- bwfan123 2y agoWow, thanks for sharing this beautiful essay by a legend that captures the essence of the llm debate. That, the use of formal languages - although an evil (since it is not a natural human language) is essential to avoid nonsense (ie hallucinations). While intuition/natural language is more imaginative, formalism (ie narrow interfaces) is a forcing function to make things work. According to Dijkstra, the use of natural languages regressed civilization by thousands of years (because of the nonsense and imprecision) ! So, expect thousands of years of LLM hell if we adopted it to replace our formal languages. Indeed, math and other symbolism/formalism is a crowning achievement of humans.