News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on The Beginning of Programming as We'll Know It. Parent comment

Re:The Beginning of Programming as We'll Know It by Chinjut on Thursday April 02, 2026 @11:36PM (#47622928)
Yes, "An LLM is just a new higher level programming language", sure. A new programming language with no tractable guarantees about the behavior of any particular program, including in practice no guarantees that the same source code (in this new programming language) will reliably produce the same behavior. This is very different from traditional programming languages and how we can reason about them.

(Yes, one can write C programs with undefined behavior, but C does also have many well-defined properties which allow people to reason about well-defined C programs logically reliably.)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Beginning of Programming as We'll Know It by bitwize on Friday April 03, 2026 @12:22AM (#47623174)
(And the behavior of any given C implementation is completely defined.)
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Beginning of Programming as We'll Know It by mikkupikku on Friday April 03, 2026 @08:19AM (#47625843)
It used to be that old farts made a big deal out of knowing the ins and outs of assembly programming and sneered at the kids who only knew "high level" languages like C, why, those damn kids didn't even understand the machine code their compilers emitted, didn't even know or care that it was so obviously suboptimal.

Really, your attitude is not new. Including even your "this is why it's different this time", its just a mirror reflecting the past.

[ Parent | on HN ]