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A sufficiently detailed spec is code

haskellforall.com

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Re: A sufficiently detailed spec is code

#51

Post by mfabbri77 »

hintymad wrote: post #28

> A sufficiently detailed spec is code This is exactly the argument in Brooks' No Silver Bullet. I still believe that it holds. However, my observation is that many people don't really need that level of details. When one prompts an AI to "write me a to-do list app", what they really mean is that "write me a to-do list app that is better that I have imagined so far", which does not really require detailed spec.

Yes. This happens because the training data contains countless SotA "to-do" apps. This argument does not scale well to other types of software.

Re: A sufficiently detailed spec is code

#52

Post by WanderPanda »

macinjosh wrote: post #24

IMHO, LLMs are better at Python and SQL than Haskell because Python and SQL syntax mirrors more aspects of human language. Whereas Haskell syntax reads more like a math equation. These are Large _Language_ Models so naturally intelligence learned from non-code sources transfers better to more human like programming languages. Math equations assume the reader has context not included in the written down part for what…

They are heavily post-trained on code and math these days. I don‘t think we can infer that much about their behavior from just the pre-training dataset anymore

Re: A sufficiently detailed spec is code

#53

Post by lmm »

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #45

A corollary of this statement is that code without a spec is not code. No /s, I think that is true - code without a spec certainly does something, but it is, by the absence of a detailed spec, undefined behavior.

On the contrary, code is a spec. In a decent language it should look like one.

Re: A sufficiently detailed spec is code

#54

Post by kikkupico »

Natural language is fluid and ambiguous while code is rigid and deterministic. Spec-driven development appears to be the best of both worlds. But really, it is the worst of both. LLMs are language models - their breakthrough capability is handling natural language. Code is meant to be unambiguous and deterministic. A spec is neither fluid nor deterministic.

Re: A sufficiently detailed spec is code

#55

Post by travisgriggs »

catlifeonmars wrote: post #41
macinjosh wrote: post #24

IMHO, LLMs are better at Python and SQL than Haskell because Python and SQL syntax mirrors more aspects of human language. Whereas Haskell syntax reads more like a math equation. These are Large _Language_ Models so naturally intelligence learned from non-code sources transfers better to more human like programming languages. Math equations assume the reader has context not included in the written down part for what…

I suspect your probably right, but just for completeness, one could also make the argument that LLMs are better at writing Haskell because they are overfit to natural language and Haskell would avoid a lot of the overfit spaces and thus would generalize better. In other words, less baggage.

I would guess they’re better at python and SQL than Haskell because the available training data for python and SQL is orders of magnitude more than Haskell.

Re: A sufficiently detailed spec is code

#57

Post by ozozozd »

Such amazing writing. And clear articulation of what I’ve been struggling to put into words - almost having to endure a mental mute state. I keep thinking it’s obvious, but it’s not, and this article explains it very elegantly.

I also enjoyed the writing style so much that I felt bad for myself for not getting to read this kind of writing enough. We are drowning in slop. We all deserve better!

Re: A sufficiently detailed spec is code

#59

Post by causalityltd »

The cognitive dissonance comes from the tension between the-spec-as-management-artifact vs the-spec-as-engineering-artifact. Author is right that advocates are selling the first but second is the only one which works.

For a manager, the spec exists in order to create a delgation ticket, something you assign to someone and done. But for a builder, it exists as a thinking tool that evolves with the code to sharpen the understanding/thinking.

I also think, that some builders are being fooled into thinking like managers because ease, but they figure it out pretty quickly.

Re: A sufficiently detailed spec is code

#60

Post by antonvs »

Panzerschrek wrote: post #40

I am developing my own programming language, but I have no specification written for it. When people tell me that I need a specification, I reply that I already have one - the source code of the language compiler.

Maybe this is your point, but the source code of any non-toy compiler is not a usable specification for the language it compiles.

If you want a specification from source code, you need to reverse engineer it. Although that’s a bit easier now, with LLMs.

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