Comment by trashb
7 hours ago
> Edgar Dijkstra called it nearly 50 years ago: we will never be programming in English, or French, or Spanish. Natural languages have not evolved to be precise enough and unambiguous enough. Semantic ambiguity and language entropy will always defeat this ambition.
This is the most important quote for any AI coding discussion.
Anyone that doesn't understand how the tools they use came to be is doomed to reinvent them.
> The folly of many people now claiming that “prompts are the new source code”,
These are the same people that create applications in MS Excel.
> These are the same people that create applications in MS Excel.
Ones that want their application to work? :) the last piece of software you should be knocking is MS Excel, in my 30+ year career the one common thread just about everywhere I worked (or contracted at) has used Excel to run some amazing sh*t
Further evidence: After all these years (far longer than we have been doing programming), we still don't do math in English or French or Spanish. We do it in carefully defined formal notations.
But so many problems (programming, but also physics and math) start as informal word problems. A major skill is being able to turn the informal into something formal and precise.