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davnicwilyesterday at 7:20 AM1 replyview on HN

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.


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valenterryyesterday at 7:39 AM

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.

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