alt Hacker NewsAfter re-reading the post once again, because I honestly thought I was missing something obvious that would make the whole thing make sense, I started to wonder if the author actually understands the scope of a computer language. When he says:
> LLMs are far more nondeterministic than previous higher level languages. They also can help you figure out things at the high level (descriptions) in a way that no previous layer could help you dealing with itself. […] What about quality and understandability? If instead of a big stack, we use a good substrate, the line count of the LLM output will be much less, and more understandable. If this is the case, we can vastly increase the quality and performance of the systems we build.
How does this even work? There is no universe I can imagine where a natural language can be universal, self descriptive, non ambiguous, and have a smaller footprint than any purpose specific language that came before it.
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To be generous and steelman the author, perhaps what they're saying is that at each layer of abstraction, there may be some new low-hanging fruit.
Whether this is doable through orchestration or through carefully guided HITL by various specialists in their fields - or maybe not at all! - I suspect will depend on which domain you're operating in.
>After re-reading the post once again, because I honestly thought I was missing something obvious that would make the whole thing make sense, I started to wonder if the author actually understands the scope of a computer language.
The problem is you restrict the scope of a computer language to the familiar mechanisms and artifacts (parsers, compilers, formalized syntax, etc), instead of taking to be "something we instruct the computer with, so that it does what we want".
>How does this even work? There is no universe I can imagine where a natural language can be universal, self descriptive, non ambiguous, and have a smaller footprint than any purpose specific language that came before it.
Doesnt matter. Who said it needs to be "universal, self descriptive, non ambiguous, and have a smaller footprint than any purpose specific language that came before it"?
It's enough that is can be used to instruct computers more succintly and at a higher level of abstraction, and that a program will come out at the end, which is more or less (doesn't have to be exact), what we wanted.
You're going to pretty hard pressed to do Rust better than Rust.
There's minimal opportunity with lifetime annotations. I'm sure very small options elsewhere, too.
The idea of replacing Rust with natural language seems insane. Maybe I'm being naive, but I can't see why or how it could possibly be useful.
Rust is simply Chinese unless you understand what it's doing. If you translate it to natural language, it's still gibberish, unless you understand what it does and why first. In which case, the syntax is nearly infinitely more expressive than natural language.
That's literally the point of the language, and it wasn't built by morons!