Comment by thenoblesunfish
2 days ago
English is not well-specified or unambiguous. Programming languages aim to be. This is a massive difference. Recall that laws are specified in English.
2 days ago
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.
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.