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Fortran is all about symbolic programming. There is no probability in the internal workings of Fortran compiler. Almost any person can learn rules and count on

by thesz 9mo ago

Fortran is all about symbolic programming. There is no probability in the internal workings of Fortran compiler. Almost any person can learn rules and count on them. LLMs are all about probabilistic programming. While they are harnessed by a lot of symbolic processing (tokens as simple example), the core is probabilistic. No hard rules can be learned. And, for what it worth, "Real programmers don't use Pascal" [1] was not written about assembler programmers, it was written about Fortran programmers, a new Priesthood. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120206010243/http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html https://web.archive.org/web/20120206010243/http://www.ee.rye... Thus, what I expect is for new Priesthood to emerge - prompt writing specialists. And this is what we see, actually.

noosphr 9mo ago
Fortran is about numerical programming without having to deal with explicit addresses. Symbolic programming is something like lisp. Llms do not manipulate symbols according to rules, they predict tokens, or arbitrary glyphs in human parlance, based on statistical rules.
- thesz 9mo ago
  Fortran internally transforms expressions to assembly using symbolic computation. a+0->a, a+b->b+a. LLMs are very much supported by symbolic computation. These "arbitrary glyphs" are computed by symbolic computation. The output of LLMs is constrained by program language grammar in code generation tasks. LLMs are often run with beam search, which is symbolic computation.