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Re:Show HN: Marsha – An LLM-Based Programming Language by bryanrasmussen on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @12:39AM (#36873163)
You seem to believe that code will be able to be written in natural language?

Many people argue this will never happen because of ambiguity of spoken language. I suppose you will agree that the level of ambiguity in spoken language will never decrease significantly give that it does not seem to have done so over the course of human evolution.

IF you do believe it will decrease - how?

I agree there will probably be thought -> computer interfaces at some time but it seems to me, from what I understand of human thought, that the non-verbal thought can be even more ambiguous than the verbal. It at any rate varies greatly between people how precise they can think, surely some people will be more suited to precise thinking and be the ones who write programs - perhaps using some sort of tool to focus and make more precise their thinking such as writing which I have found is often a great enabler of focus and clarity.

If however you can agree that ambiguity will not decrease what does this do about inherent bugs introduced by ambiguity, how do you see the debugging process? Do you think that the ambiguity of spoken language creates more and greater bugs than the sort of bugs that occur today in programs? I personally believe that ambiguity bugs will be a whole new order of bugs layered on top of all the other types of bugs we have now.

Thus, due to the problems of ambiguity in human thought, I do not believe this vision will come to pass, although I believe there will be spoken instructions to computers that do particular things.

Re:Show HN: Marsha – An LLM-Based Programming Language by quickthrower2 on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @01:34AM (#36873499)
Take a typical remote first development effort like a OSS project. How does this get developed? Language as text!

So at some level it must be possible to specify what you mean in language and have agent’s turn that into code.

I think what you need is more refined language. Don’t just say I want X. Give examples (these become unit tests). Have the LLM ask clarifying questions.

Whether we can make something useful today like that with GPT4 I am not sure but it will be possible.

The language crafting (and understanding if importance if accuracy) will be the hired skill when “programmers are fired”. That is a harder to AI-ify skill.