Comment by davnicwil
19 days ago
I agree with your conclusion but I don't think it'd necessarily be unintelligible. I think you can describe a program unambiguously using everyday natural language, it'd just be tediously inefficient to interpret.
To make it sensible you'd end up standardising the way you say things: words, order, etc and probably add punctuation and formatting conventions to make it easier to read.
By then you're basically just at a verbose programming language, and the last step to an actual programming language is just dropping a few filler words here and there to make it more concise while preserving the meaning.
I think so too.
However I think there is a misunderstanding between being "deterministic" and "unambiguous". Even C is an ambiguous programming language" but it is "deterministic" in that it behaves in the same ambiguous/undefined way under the same conditions.
The same can be achieved with LLMs too. They are "more" ambiguous of course and if someone doesn't want that, then they have to resort to exactly what you just described. But that was not the point that I was making.
I'm not sure there's any conflict with what you're saying, which I guess is that language can describe instructions which are deterministic while still being ambiguous in certain ways.
My point is just a narrower version of that: where language is completely unambiguous, it is also deterministic where interepreted in some deterministic way. In that sense plain, intelligible english can be a sort of (very verbose) programming language if you just ensure it is unambiguous which is certainly possible.
It may be that this can still be the case if it's partly ambiguous but that doesn't conflict with the narrower case.
I think we're agreed on LLMs in that they introduce non-determinism in the interpretation of even completely unambiguous instructions. So it's all thrown out as the input is only relevant in some probabilistic sense.