Comment by danaris
2 days ago
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've made a programming language.
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.
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/
This is funny :) But that's exactly why I said that even though having so many languages is inefficient, the real solution is to create an interface that makes the problem obsolete. LLMs only care about intent, not syntax.
I think this can be resolved with verbosity, our old friends abstraction and modularization, and an unfamiliarly flexible parser.