Hasnt natural language always been the highest level language?
LLMs as the new high level language
151–160 of 396 posts
Re: LLMs as the new high level language
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Why not?
Here's a very simple algorithm: you tell the other person (in English) literally what key they have to press next. So you can easily have them write all the java code you want in a deterministic and reproducible way.
And yes, maybe that doesn't seem much different from a programming language which... is the point no? But it's still natural English.
Re: LLMs as the new high level language
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
C can absolutely be ambiguous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undefined_behavior
Re: LLMs as the new high level language
#154Earlier 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…
A determinisitic prompt + seed used to generate an output is interesting as a way to deterministically record entirely how code came about, but it's also not a thing people are actually doing. Right now, everyone is slinging around LLM outputs without any trying to be reproducible; no seed, nothing. What you've described and what the article describe are very different.
Yes, you are right. I was mostly speaking in theoretical terms - currently people don't work like that. And you would also have to use the same trained LLM of course, so using a third party provider probably doesn't give that guarantee.
But it would be possible in theory.
Re: LLMs as the new high level language
#155This is an exaggeration, if you store the prompt that was "compiled" by today's LLMs there is no guarantee that in 4 months from now you will be able to replicate the same result. I can take some C or Fortran code from 10 years ago, build it and get identical results.
That is a wobbly assertion. You certainly would need to run the same compiler, forgo any recent optimisations, architecture updates and the likes if your code has numerical sensitive parts.
You certainly can get identical results, but it's equally certainly not going to be that simple a path frequently.
Re: LLMs as the new high level language
#156At this point I'm just waiting for people claiming they managed team of 20 people, where "20 people" were LLMs being fed a prompt
Re: LLMs as the new high level language
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> I talk to my cousin who's doing the web hosting and he says he can't host a "Pee Haich Pee" site
I already addressed this exact argument in another comment. In short: hosting is an implementation detail. The LLM can solve this problem just like any coding bug. The user can give his cousin's email to the LLM, which will solve the issue by finding better hosting, rewriting the program in another language, or using Docker.
Hosting is not a hard problem to solve, compared to other issues.
Re: LLMs as the new high level language
#158> The code that LLMs make is much worse than what I can write: almost certainly; but the same could be said about your assembler
Has this been true since the 90s?
I pretty much only hear people saying modern compilers are unbeatable.
Re: LLMs as the new high level language
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I agree with your conclusion but I don't think it'd necessarily be unintelligible. I think you can describe a program unambiguously using everyday natural language, it'd just be tediously inefficient to interpret. To make it sensible you'd end up standardising the way you say things: words, order, etc and probably add punctuation and formatting conventions to make it easier to read. By then you're basically just at a…
I think so too.
However I think there is a misunderstanding between being "deterministic" and "unambiguous". Even C is an ambiguous programming language" but it is "deterministic" in that it behaves in the same ambiguous/undefined way under the same conditions.
The same can be achieved with LLMs too. They are "more" ambiguous of course and if someone doesn't want that, then they have to resort to exactly what you just described. But that was not the point that I was making.
Re: LLMs as the new high level language
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I don't think it would be unintelligible.
It would be very verbose, yes, but not unintelligible.