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With the Altair you had switches to input bits of CPU instructions. Then punchcards. Then Telex. Then assembly in a terminal. Then C, Pascal and Smalltalk. Then
by edg5000 2y ago
With the Altair you had switches to input bits of CPU instructions. Then punchcards. Then Telex. Then assembly in a terminal. Then C, Pascal and Smalltalk. Then Java, C++, Python, PHP. Then the mountains of libraries and frameworks, realtime indexers, linters, autocomplete, suggestions.
The next step seems that we will write programs in prompts. Maybe we will get a language that is more structured than the current natural language prompts and of much higher order than than our current high level programming constructs and libraries.
- skydhash 2y agoYou can’t eliminate formalism in programming. You can only abstract it away by creating a metaprogramming layer for the current one. And prompt isn’t that. Prompting is a blind shot hoping to hit something good.
- edg5000 2y agoIndeed, that is why we may end up with some sort of standardized and structured way to write functional descriptions of software that we can train AIs on. How close to natural language it will be I'm not sure. Arguably, since the birth of computing we see programming languages inching ever closer to natural language, albeit still far removed. Perhaps we will end up with something indeed really formal and strict, but much more high-level. AIs could than be trained on the full language; maybe we can then solve the "confident yet wrong" problem with current agentic programming.