Comment by BoorishBears
2 days ago
Eh, how modern technology works is not really the part I'm selling: that's just how it works.
Coding languages haven't been describing even a fraction of the rules and state they encapsulate since what? Punch cards?
It wasn't long until we started to rely on exponential number of layered abstractions to do anything useful with computers, and very quickly we traded precision and determinism for benefits like being concise and easier to reason about.
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But also, the context here was someone calling prompting a "imprecise nondeterministic programming language": obviously their bone is the "imprecise nondeterministic" part, not distilling what defines a programming language.
I get it doesn't feel warm and fuzzy to the average engineer, but realistically we were hand engineering solutions with "precise deterministic programming languages", they were similarly probabilistic, and they performed worse.
Name a single programming language that is probabilistic in any way?
- A text prompt isn't probabilistic, the output is.
- https://labs.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=LABS:0:5033606075766:AP...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_(software)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probabilistic_programming
I explained in the most clear language possible why a fixation on the "programming language" part of the original comment is borderline non-sequitur. But if you're insistent on railroading the conversation regardless... at least try to be good at it, no?
I skimmed your comment since you were making the strange comparison that modern coding is basically probabilistic to a degree that prompting is, so I see now you weren't the one to say it's "probabilistic programming". But you are still trying to say that normal programming is basically probabilistic in some relevant way, which I think is quite ridiculous. I don't see how anything about normal engineering is probabilistic other than mistakes people make.
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