Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

LLMs as the new high level language

federicopereiro.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 396 posts

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#111

Post by cortesoft »

WoodenChair wrote: post #103
valenterry wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you say if someone has a project written in, let's say, PureScript and then they use a Java backend to generate/overwrite and also version control Java code. If they claim that this would be a Java project, you would probably disagree right? Seems to me that LLMs are the same thing, that is, if you also store the prompt and everything else to reproduce the same code generation process. Since LLMs can be ma…

PureScript is a programming language. English is not. A better analogy would be what would you say about someone who uses a No Code solution that behind the scenes writes Java. I would say that's a much better analogy. NoCode -> Java is similar to LLM -> Java. I'm not debating whether LLMs are amazing tools or whether they change programming. Clearly both are true. I'm debating whether people are using accurate analo…

> PureScript is a programming language. English is not.

Why can’t English be a programming language? You would absolutely be able to describe a program in English well enough that it would unambiguously be able to instruct a person on the exact program to write. If it can do that, why couldn’t it be used to tell a computer exactly what program to write?

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#112

Post by leptons »

ChrisGreenHeur wrote: post #89
ekropotin wrote: post #87

IDK how everyone else feel about it, but a non-deterministic “compiler” is the last thing I need.

I may have bad news for you on how compilers typically work.

Compilers are about 10 orders of magnitude more deterministic than LLMs, if not more.

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#113

Post by csmantle »

ChrisGreenHeur wrote: post #89
ekropotin wrote: post #87

IDK how everyone else feel about it, but a non-deterministic “compiler” is the last thing I need.

I may have bad news for you on how compilers typically work.

If you are referring to timestamps, buildids, comptime environments, hardwired heuristics for optimization, or even bugs in compilers -- those are not the same kind of non-determinism as in LLMs. The former ones can be mitigated by long-standing practices of reproducible builds, while the latter is intrinsic to LLMs if they are meant to be more useful than a voice recorder.

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#114

Post by raincole »

nly wrote: post #27

I have a source file of a few hundred lines implementing an algorithm that no LLM I've tried (and I've tried them all) is able to replicate, or even suggest, when prompted with the problem. Even with many follow up prompts and hints. The implementations that come out are buggy or just plain broken The problem is a relatively simple one, and the algorithm uses a few clever tricks. The implementation is subtle...but no…

[flagged]

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#116

Post by matthewbauer »

cortesoft wrote: post #111
WoodenChair wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PureScript is a programming language. English is not. A better analogy would be what would you say about someone who uses a No Code solution that behind the scenes writes Java. I would say that's a much better analogy. NoCode -> Java is similar to LLM -> Java. I'm not debating whether LLMs are amazing tools or whether they change programming. Clearly both are true. I'm debating whether people are using accurate analo…

> PureScript is a programming language. English is not. Why can’t English be a programming language? You would absolutely be able to describe a program in English well enough that it would unambiguously be able to instruct a person on the exact program to write. If it can do that, why couldn’t it be used to tell a computer exactly what program to write?

I don’t think you can do that. Or at least if you could, it would be an unintelligible version of English that would not seem much different from a programming language.

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#117

Post by lpnam0201 »

cortesoft wrote: post #111
WoodenChair wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PureScript is a programming language. English is not. A better analogy would be what would you say about someone who uses a No Code solution that behind the scenes writes Java. I would say that's a much better analogy. NoCode -> Java is similar to LLM -> Java. I'm not debating whether LLMs are amazing tools or whether they change programming. Clearly both are true. I'm debating whether people are using accurate analo…

> PureScript is a programming language. English is not. Why can’t English be a programming language? You would absolutely be able to describe a program in English well enough that it would unambiguously be able to instruct a person on the exact program to write. If it can do that, why couldn’t it be used to tell a computer exactly what program to write?

English can be ambiguous. Programming languages like C or Java cannot

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#118

Post by chasd00 »

aryonoco wrote: post #51
beefsack wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prompting isn't programming. Prompting is managing.

Interesting how the definition “real programming” keeps changing. I’m pretty sure when the assembler first came, bare metal machine code programmers said “this isn’t programming”. And I can imagine their horror when the compiler came along.

I think about those conversations a lot. I’m in the high power rocketry hobby and wrote my own flight controller using micropython and parts from Adafruit. Worked just fine and did everything I wanted it to do yet the others in the hobby just couldn’t stand that it wasn’t in C. They were genuinely impressed then I said micropython and all of a sudden it was trash. People just have these weird obsessions that blind them to anything different.

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#119

Post by sarchertech »

idiotsecant wrote: post #97
asa400 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all you (not you specifically, more of a royal “you” or “we”) are is a collection of skills centered around putting code into an editor and opening pull requests as fast as possible, then sure, you might be cooked. But if your job depends on taste, design, intuition, sociability, judgement, coaching, inspiring, explaining, or empathy in the context of using technology to solve human problems, you’ll be fine. The p…

It turns out that corporations value these things right up until a cheaper almost as good alternative is available. The writing is on the wall for all white collar work. Not this year or next, but it's coming.

If all white collar work goes, we’re going to have to completely restructure the economy or collapse completely.

Being a plumber won’t save you when half the work force is unemployed.

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#120

Post by mjr00 »

raincole wrote: post #109
mjr00 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think I am. If you ask an LLM for a burger web site, you will get a burger web site. That's the only category that matters. If one burger website generated uses PHP and the other is plain javascript, which completely changes the way the website has to be hosted--this category matters quite a bit, no?

> this category matters quite a bit, no? No. Put yourself in the shoes of the owner of the burger restaurant (who only heard the term "JavaScript" twice in his life and vaguely remember it's probably something related to "Java", which he heard three times) and you'll know why the answer is no.

I put myself in the shoes of the burger restaurant owner. I vibe coded a website. Sweet. I talk to my cousin who's doing the web hosting and he says he can't host a "Pee Haich Pee" site. I don't know what that is. Suddenly the thing that didn't matter actually really fucking matters

This is like saying it doesn't matter if your pipes are iron, lead or PVC because you don't see them. They all move water and shit where they need to be, so no problem. Ignorance is bliss I guess? Plumbers are obsolete!

Post reply on HN