Comment by bulbar
1 month ago
Giving a precise description of what the computer is supposed to do is exactly what programming is.
The more specific your requirements the closer you get to natural language not being useful anymore.
1 month ago
Giving a precise description of what the computer is supposed to do is exactly what programming is.
The more specific your requirements the closer you get to natural language not being useful anymore.
This is actually my biggest gripe with vibecoding. The single best feature of any programming language is that it is precise. And that is what we throw out?! I favor of natural language, of all things?! We're insane!
It turns out an awful lot of precision (plenty for many things) lives in library and web APIs, documentation, header files and dependency manifests. Language can literally just point at it without repeating it all. Avoidance of mistake through elimination of manual copying in things like actuarial and ballistics tables was what the original computers were built for.
Custom written code can also point at those APIs and libraries without repeating it all? Or am I missing your point?
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Historically we almost entirely moved from ASM to C, a language with lots of undefined behavior, because precision is not the most valued feature of languages.
When I say "best part of any programming language" I obviously mean "best part of the in-spec defined parts of any programming language".
Your suggestion that because languages have specified undefined behaviour, they are somehow not precise, makes little sense.
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UB is about edge cases that a compiler should not be enforced to check against and an occurrence is always a bug. You don't necessarily need a precise description of the actual faulty behavior.
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That's because very often the precision is just common sense that can be derived, either from general knowledge, or from your existing code.
If you had to give precise instructions to someone so they could get anything done you'd call them a junior.
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I code mostly in APL and J. It’s much faster to type the code than explain everything to AI.
The exceptions that prove the rule. When your programming language is built up of singular Unicode characters with specific meanings, of course that's faster than typing out in English what you want.
What do you use them for? For most AI users it's usually CRUD and I've never seen a web server or frontend in APL like languages.
The exception is the rule.
The reason why programming is hard is because most languages force you to use a hammer when you need a screw driver. LLMs are very good at misusing hammers and most people find them useful for that reason.
If you use a sane dsl instead the natural language description of a problem is always more complex and much longer than the equivalent description in a dsl. It's also usually wrong to boot.
This is what algebra used to look like before variables: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes%27s_cattle_problem#...
I don't think you will find anyone who can do better than an LLM at one shotting the prose version of the problem. Both will of course be wrong.
But I also don't think you will find an LLM that can solve the problem faster than a human with Prolog when you have to use the prose description of the problem.
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