4 ms·

Only someone who has never built anything of significant complexity and utility can think that putting natural language encoding between you and the bytes is a

Only someone who has never built anything of significant complexity and utility can think that putting natural language encoding between you and the bytes is a net positive. AppleScript might convince me of your argument.. ;-) But, seriously, we've been putting abstractions between "us and the bytes" ever since Fortran and COBOL appeared (and indeed, earlier). We can argue about the quality and expressiveness of those abstractions, and there are a lot of arguments against natural languages in this task, but the broad idea of putting things in between developers and machines is sound so it's worth continuing to explore IMHO.

withinboredom 2y ago
sure; but these languages we speak to computers in are deliberately non-ambiguous and lack nuance. Natural language is both ambiguous and nuanced. "Have a nice day!" can mean many things (an insult, or sincere, for example).
- out_of_protocol 2y ago
  Very maddening, some regular phrasees can be interpreted in multitude of ways, often contradictory. Even with full context it's still ambiguous
- petercooper 2y ago
  I accept your point and agree in principle! However, I think there's a lot of fertile ground to be researched and experimented with here. I'm mostly pushing back against the parent's assertion that "putting natural language encoding between [a developer] and the bytes" is inherently of no net benefit. (I'd also argue many programming languages introduce ambiguity, are riddled with undefined behaviors, subject to 'dialects', and distorted by issues similar to those affecting natural languages. C++ perhaps most notoriously. This is something I'd rather debate in good humor in person, though, as I suspect this could be an entirely separate problem.. ;-))
  - withinboredom 2y ago
    I’m not sure why you need to do any research. Just look at how hard it is to drag software requirements from a business person. Or how hard it is to explain to a “pedantic asshole” how to make a sandwich (https://youtu.be/FN2RM-CHkuI?si=3lanUOhXkj2sP8GA https://youtu.be/FN2RM-CHkuI?si=3lanUOhXkj2sP8GA).
klabb3 2y ago
All those layers are stable and deterministic. You can open it up and check, in most cases, how the upper layer calls the lower layer, should it be necessary. If you have an LLM between you and the code, there is not even such a thing as ”source code”, only a history of prompts. You can’t check in your prompts in git, and re-generate the same code later. In fact, it’s more like the antithesis of the reproducible builds movement. It’s introducing a proprietary networked high latency chaos agent into the critical path.
- petercooper 2y ago
  I accept your points today, but I'm optimistic this problem will be resolved in the mid-term. I just feel some of the arguments smell similar to concerns levelled at the earliest compiler developers about the perils of abstraction. Now we gleefully stack layer upon layer with most developers being unable to grok more than a layer below their choice of abstraction (if they're good!) I am extremely LLM-optimistic though and largely in favor of abstractions, so that fuels my viewpoint. I still remember my dad, an embedded developer in the 90s-00s, ranting about how many people were starting to use 'inefficient and unpredictable' C compilers than whatever assembly he was using. I reckon he'd be appalled to learn that now even assembly isn't always a reliable model of what's really happening on the CPU thanks to microcode and optimizations.. ;-)
  - ConspiracyFact 2y ago
    The thing is, going from a high-level scripting language to a natural-language interface is a massive jump. The difference between a python script and a hand-crafted executable is essentially nothing in comparison. I don’t think that a single technology is going to bridge that yawning gap overnight.
    - roland35 2y ago
      Plus I feel like at least compilers are at least deterministic? AI is not repeatable or provable at all
  - klabb3 2y ago

withinboredom 2y ago

sure; but these languages we speak to computers in are deliberately non-ambiguous and lack nuance. Natural language is both ambiguous and nuanced. "Have a nice day!" can mean many things (an insult, or sincere, for example).

out_of_protocol 2y ago
Very maddening, some regular phrasees can be interpreted in multitude of ways, often contradictory. Even with full context it's still ambiguous
petercooper 2y ago
I accept your point and agree in principle! However, I think there's a lot of fertile ground to be researched and experimented with here. I'm mostly pushing back against the parent's assertion that "putting natural language encoding between [a developer] and the bytes" is inherently of no net benefit. (I'd also argue many programming languages introduce ambiguity, are riddled with undefined behaviors, subject to 'dialects', and distorted by issues similar to those affecting natural languages. C++ perhaps most notoriously. This is something I'd rather debate in good humor in person, though, as I suspect this could be an entirely separate problem.. ;-))
- withinboredom 2y ago
  I’m not sure why you need to do any research. Just look at how hard it is to drag software requirements from a business person. Or how hard it is to explain to a “pedantic asshole” how to make a sandwich (https://youtu.be/FN2RM-CHkuI?si=3lanUOhXkj2sP8GA https://youtu.be/FN2RM-CHkuI?si=3lanUOhXkj2sP8GA).

klabb3 2y ago

All those layers are stable and deterministic. You can open it up and check, in most cases, how the upper layer calls the lower layer, should it be necessary. If you have an LLM between you and the code, there is not even such a thing as ”source code”, only a history of prompts. You can’t check in your prompts in git, and re-generate the same code later. In fact, it’s more like the antithesis of the reproducible builds movement. It’s introducing a proprietary networked high latency chaos agent into the critical path.

petercooper 2y ago
I accept your points today, but I'm optimistic this problem will be resolved in the mid-term. I just feel some of the arguments smell similar to concerns levelled at the earliest compiler developers about the perils of abstraction. Now we gleefully stack layer upon layer with most developers being unable to grok more than a layer below their choice of abstraction (if they're good!) I am extremely LLM-optimistic though and largely in favor of abstractions, so that fuels my viewpoint. I still remember my dad, an embedded developer in the 90s-00s, ranting about how many people were starting to use 'inefficient and unpredictable' C compilers than whatever assembly he was using. I reckon he'd be appalled to learn that now even assembly isn't always a reliable model of what's really happening on the CPU thanks to microcode and optimizations.. ;-)
- ConspiracyFact 2y ago
  The thing is, going from a high-level scripting language to a natural-language interface is a massive jump. The difference between a python script and a hand-crafted executable is essentially nothing in comparison. I don’t think that a single technology is going to bridge that yawning gap overnight.
  - roland35 2y ago
    Plus I feel like at least compilers are at least deterministic? AI is not repeatable or provable at all
- klabb3 2y ago