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lunar_mycroftyesterday at 5:48 PM1 replyview on HN

It's impossible for human developers too. Natural language descriptions of a program are either much more painful and time consuming to write than the code they describe, or contain some degree of ambiguity which the thing translating the description into code has to resolve (and the probability of the resolution the entity writing the description would have chosen and the one entity translating it into code chose matching perfectly approach zero).

It can make sense to trade off some amount of control for productivity, but the tradeoff is inherent as soon as a project moves beyond a single developer hand writing all of the code.


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hansmayeryesterday at 8:25 PM

I agree - the whole BS of "Hottest new programming language is English" is complete nonsense. There is something about writing the code directly from your mind that skips over the "language circuits" and makes it much more precise. Perhaps as humans with education we obtain an ability to think in programming language itself I suppose? It's probably similar to what happens in the mind of a composer or painter. This is why the natural language will never be the interface the big "AI" companies are making it to be.