On Tue, 28 Jul 2026 at 15:42, Gard Spreemann <[email protected]> wrote:
> But now you're comparing LLMs to junior programmers! My issue is with
> comparing the role of LLMs to that of compilers or calculators. We
> definitely interact with junior programmers through natural language
> already, so nothing changes there. My point is that we interact with
> compilers and calculators through *formal languages*, and that therefore
> it's not helpful to compare LLMs to those.
But we only do that (interact with compilers with formal language) because
that was historically the only option that worked. If we could describe the
program in natural language to the compiler and get a good result .... we
would. In fact the whole history of programming language developemnt shows
us that this is *exactly* what people have always tried to achieve. COBOL
was sold as English-like data processing language that would require no
programmers. BASIC was created to be as close to simple English as
possible. The whole object oriented programming thing was (in part) created
to make code more alligned with language sentence structures. Python values
highly the the approach of nouns and verbs and code that is readable as
natural language would be. And those are only the most widely succesfull
examples.
The way LLMs are developing, I would not be too surprised to see a more
formal intermediate representation being developed that is valid natural
language, but at the same time is also a very high level programming
language that has a deterministic output. For the cases where that is
important.
Also, you *can* use a junior programmer like a calculator, with some effort
- just give them a strict style guide (with autoformatter), a library of
coding patterns that they are expected to always reuse and so on :D Also
many contractors have been indistinguishable in their output from worst
LLMs, decades before LLMs existed. ;)
--
Best regards,
Aigars Mahinovs
