Comment by valenterry
18 days ago
What would you say if someone has a project written in, let's say, PureScript and then they use a Java backend to generate/overwrite and also version control Java code. If they claim that this would be a Java project, you would probably disagree right? Seems to me that LLMs are the same thing, that is, if you also store the prompt and everything else to reproduce the same code generation process. Since LLMs can be made deterministic, I don't see why that wouldn't be possible.
PureScript is a programming language. English is not. A better analogy would be what would you say about someone who uses a No Code solution that behind the scenes writes Java. I would say that's a much better analogy. NoCode -> Java is similar to LLM -> Java.
I'm not debating whether LLMs are amazing tools or whether they change programming. Clearly both are true. I'm debating whether people are using accurate analogies.
> PureScript is a programming language. English is not.
Why can’t English be a programming language? You would absolutely be able to describe a program in English well enough that it would unambiguously be able to instruct a person on the exact program to write. If it can do that, why couldn’t it be used to tell a computer exactly what program to write?
> Why can’t English be a programming language? You would absolutely be able to describe a program in English well enough that it would unambiguously be able to instruct a person on the exact program to write
Various attempt has been made. We got Cobol, Basic, SQL,… Programming language needs to be formal and English is not that.
I don’t think you can do that. Or at least if you could, it would be an unintelligible version of English that would not seem much different from a programming language.
5 replies →
No. Natural language is vague, ambiguous and indirect.
Watch these poor children struggle with writing instructions for making a sandwich:
https://youtu.be/FN2RM-CHkuI
English can be ambiguous. Programming languages like C or Java cannot
4 replies →
A determinisitic prompt + seed used to generate an output is interesting as a way to deterministically record entirely how code came about, but it's also not a thing people are actually doing. Right now, everyone is slinging around LLM outputs without any trying to be reproducible; no seed, nothing. What you've described and what the article describe are very different.
Yes, you are right. I was mostly speaking in theoretical terms - currently people don't work like that. And you would also have to use the same trained LLM of course, so using a third party provider probably doesn't give that guarantee.
But it would be possible in theory.