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

I want to be a Journey Programmer Again

hexhowells.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 79 posts

Re: I want to be a Journey Programmer Again

#61

Post by sotix »

xandrius wrote: post #60
globnomulous wrote: post #57

Students of ancient languages fall into one of two camps: those who use translations for 'assistance' and those who don't. Classroom experiences have shown me that the two groups of students learn vastly different skills. The group who struggle through texts by themselves with relying on any shortcuts -- they just sit with the text -- probably won't become top-shelf philologists, but when you give them a sentence the…

One could say this about absolutely any technology. Using a hoe is making you weaker than if you just used your bare hands. Using a calculator is making your brain lose skill in doing complicated arithmetic in your head. Most have never built a fire completely from scratch, they surely are lacking certain skills but do/should they care? But as with everything else, you can take technology to do more, things that migh…

Does the hoe operate itself?

I took a statistics course in high school where we learned how to do everything on a calculator. I was terrible and didn’t understand statistics at the end of it. My teacher gave me a gentleman’s C. I decided to retake the course in college where my teacher taught us how to calculate the formulas by hand. After learning them by hand, I applied everything on exams with my calculator. I finished the class with a 100/100, and my teacher said there was no need for me to take the final exam. It was clear I understood the concept.

What changed between the two classes? Well, I actually learned statistics rather than how to let a tool do the work for me. Once I learned the concept, then I was able to use the tool in a beneficial way.

Re: I want to be a Journey Programmer Again

#63

Post by bsder »

globnomulous wrote: post #57

Students of ancient languages fall into one of two camps: those who use translations for 'assistance' and those who don't. Classroom experiences have shown me that the two groups of students learn vastly different skills. The group who struggle through texts by themselves with relying on any shortcuts -- they just sit with the text -- probably won't become top-shelf philologists, but when you give them a sentence the…

> To me that's a Faustian bargain. Every time someone hands off the boring stuff to the machine, I'd wager they're weakening the parts of themselves that they call upon when they want to work on the 'interesting' stuff.

It's worse than that, people who rely too much on the AI never learn how to tell when it is wrong.

This is different from things like "nobody complains about using a calculator".

A calculator doesn't lie; LLMs on the other hand lie all the time.

(And, to be fair, even the calculator statement isn't completely true. The reason why the HP 12C is so popular is that calculators did lie about some financial calculations (numerical inaccuracy). It was deemed too hard for business majors to figure out when and why so they just converged on a known standard.)

Re: I want to be a Journey Programmer Again

#64

Post by horsellama »

syx wrote: post #31
pyman wrote: post #6

Feels like we're heading towards a world where computer languages disappear, and we just use human language to tell machines what to do. Kinda like how typewriters got replaced by computers in the 80s. Back then, people spent so much time making sure there were no typos, they'd lose focus on the actual story they were trying to write. Same thing's happening now with code. We waste so much time dealing with syntax, fi…

While I agree with all the previous comments, your comment sparked an idea in me. I started imagining a future where we develop a new programming language optimized for LLMs to write and understand. In this hypothetical scenario, we would still need developers to debug and review the code to ensure deterministic outputs. Maybe this isn't so far-fetched after all. Of course, this is just speculation and imagination on…

you’d need a training set covering all the useful cases. Something that we don’t have even now for mainstream languages

Re: I want to be a Journey Programmer Again

#65

Post by quesera »

thenoblesunfish wrote: post #48
pyman wrote: post #6

Feels like we're heading towards a world where computer languages disappear, and we just use human language to tell machines what to do. Kinda like how typewriters got replaced by computers in the 80s. Back then, people spent so much time making sure there were no typos, they'd lose focus on the actual story they were trying to write. Same thing's happening now with code. We waste so much time dealing with syntax, fi…

English is not well-specified or unambiguous. Programming languages aim to be. This is a massive difference. Recall that laws are specified in English.

Laws attempt to solve this problem with verbosity. It works pretty well but of course the exceptions are always interesting.

But I think the domain of an AI-first PL would or could be much smaller. So the language is "lower-level" than English, but "higher-level" than any existing PL including AppleScript etc, because it would not have to follow the same kinds of strict parser rules.

With a smaller domain, I think the necessary verbosity of an AI-first PL could be acceptable and less ambiguous than law.

Re: I want to be a Journey Programmer Again

#66

Post by quesera »

danaris wrote: post #26
pyman wrote: post #6

Feels like we're heading towards a world where computer languages disappear, and we just use human language to tell machines what to do. Kinda like how typewriters got replaced by computers in the 80s. Back then, people spent so much time making sure there were no typos, they'd lose focus on the actual story they were trying to write. Same thing's happening now with code. We waste so much time dealing with syntax, fi…

Sorry, this is implausible. English is just too poorly-specified. Programs need to be able to know exactly what they're supposed to do next, what their output is supposed to be, etc. Even humans need to ask each other for clarification and such all the time. If you want to use English to specify a program, by the time you've adjusted it to be clear and specific enough to actually be able to do that...it turns out you…

I think this can be resolved with verbosity, our old friends abstraction and modularization, and an unfamiliarly flexible parser.

Re: I want to be a Journey Programmer Again

#67

Post by pyman »

thenoblesunfish wrote: post #48
pyman wrote: post #6

Feels like we're heading towards a world where computer languages disappear, and we just use human language to tell machines what to do. Kinda like how typewriters got replaced by computers in the 80s. Back then, people spent so much time making sure there were no typos, they'd lose focus on the actual story they were trying to write. Same thing's happening now with code. We waste so much time dealing with syntax, fi…

English is not well-specified or unambiguous. Programming languages aim to be. This is a massive difference. Recall that laws are specified in English.

This is an interesting debate. For me, the real question is: What's the goal of any language (human or programming)?

In my opinion, it's to communicate intent, so that intent can be turned into action. And guess what? LLMs are incredibly good at picking up intent through pattern matching.

So, if the goal of a language is to express intent, and LLMs often get our intent faster than a software developer, then why is English considered worse than Python? For an LLM, it's the same: just patterns.

Re: I want to be a Journey Programmer Again

#68

Post by sanderjd »

lubujackson wrote: post #44
sanderjd wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I'm finding LLMs incredibly useful, this "world where computer languages disappear" doesn't resonate with me at all. I have yet to see any workflows where the computer language is no longer a critical piece of the puzzle, or even significantly diminished in importance. I think there is an important difference between LLM-interpreted English, and compiler-emitted Assembly, which is determinism. The reason w…

I predict we enter a world where these wand waving prompts are backed by well-structured frameworks that eliminate the need to dig in the code. Originally I thought LLMs would add a new abstraction layer, like C++ -> PHP, but now I think we will begin replacing swaths of "logically knowable" processes one by one, with dynamic and robust interfaces. In other words, LLMs, if working under the right restrictions, will a…

This is possible. But when I read something like this, I just wonder: Why would this be more efficient than doing this with the same component we already call "libraries" - that is, a normal library or component created with some computer language - and just using AI to create and perfect those libraries more quickly?

I'm not even sure I disagree with your comment... I agree that I think LLMs will "add a new layer of libraries" ... but I think it seems fairly likely that they'll do that by generating a bunch of computer code?

Re: I want to be a Journey Programmer Again

#69

Post by [deleted] »

quesera wrote: post #65
thenoblesunfish wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is not well-specified or unambiguous. Programming languages aim to be. This is a massive difference. Recall that laws are specified in English.

Laws attempt to solve this problem with verbosity. It works pretty well but of course the exceptions are always interesting. But I think the domain of an AI-first PL would or could be much smaller. So the language is "lower-level" than English, but "higher-level" than any existing PL including AppleScript etc, because it would not have to follow the same kinds of strict parser rules. With a smaller domain, I think th…

[deleted]

Re: I want to be a Journey Programmer Again

#70

Post by pyman »

Disposal8433 wrote: post #27
pyman wrote: post #6

Feels like we're heading towards a world where computer languages disappear, and we just use human language to tell machines what to do. Kinda like how typewriters got replaced by computers in the 80s. Back then, people spent so much time making sure there were no typos, they'd lose focus on the actual story they were trying to write. Same thing's happening now with code. We waste so much time dealing with syntax, fi…

> We waste so much time dealing with syntax, fixing bugs, naming variables, setting up configs I definitely don't do that. It's a very small part of my job. And AFAIK, LLMs cannot generate assembly language yet, and CPUs don't understand English.

We live in a world with 7,000 human languages and around 8,000 programming languages. Most people only learn a handful, which limits how effectively they can express intent. This is inefficient.

In theory, one universal language would solve that, for both humans and machines.

Maybe the best solution isn't one language (English, Spanish, Golang, or Python), but one interface that understands all of them. And that's what LLMs might become.

Post reply on HN