Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming"

Re:Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programm... by soulofmischief on Saturday April 05, 2025 @11:00AM (#43594009)

Your error is in assuming (or at least not disproving) that natural language cannot fully capture the precision of a programming language. But we already see in real life how higher-level languages, while sometimes making you give up control of underlying mechanisms, allow you to still create the same programs you'd create with other languages, barring any specific technical feature. What is different here though is that natural language actually allows you to reduce and increase precision as needed, anywhere you want, offering both high and low level descriptions of a program.

You aren't stating the obvious. You're making unbacked claims based on your intuition of what transformers are. And even offering up the tired "stochastic parrot" claim. If you can't back up your claims, I don't know what else to tell you. You can't flip it around and ask me to prove the negative.

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Re:Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programm... by soraminazuki on Saturday April 05, 2025 @07:43PM (#43597760)

If labeling claims as "tired" makes it false, not a single fact in the world can be considered as backed by evidence. I'm not flipping anything around either, because again, it's squarely on you to provide proof for your claims and not those who question it. You're essentially making the claim that transformers can reverse a non-reversible function. That's like saying you can reverse a hash although multiple inputs can result in the same hash. That's not even "unbacked claims" territory, it defies logic.

I'm still not convinced LLMs are mere abstractions in the same way programming language implementations are. Even though programmers might give up some control of the implementation details when writing code, language implementors still decides all those details. With LLMs, no one does. That's not an abstraction, that's chaos.

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Re:Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programm... by soulofmischief on Saturday April 05, 2025 @08:51PM (#43598058)

I have been careful to use language like "theoretically" throughout my posts, and to focus on leaving doors open until we know for sure they are closed. You are claiming they're already closed, without evidence. This is a big difference in how we are engaging with this subject. I'm sure we would find we agree on a number of things but I don't think we're going to move the needle on this discussion much more. I'm fine with just amicably ending it here if you'd like.

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