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Re:The compiler was supposed to end programming too by nostrademons on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @03:27PM (#50186236)
There's a whole rats nest of undefined behavior (at least in languages like C, C++, PHP, and Perl) where it's very easy to write a syntactic utterance whose output is not deterministic, and the usual outcome is "your machine is now pwned". A significant portion of the Internet was taken offline this morning because of one, with numerous HN stories documenting it.

Newer languages consider this to be a misfeature, and have taken pains to define far more of the language semantics outright, even if the definition is simply "This is a compile error" or "This is a panic." It's interesting that we're now going back the opposite way with LLMs, with their ability to generate code that does something for any natural-language prompt being a major selling point.

Re:The compiler was supposed to end programming too by troauei on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @03:43PM (#50186505)
Yes, but only a portion of the languages are undefined behavior. The rest is fairly predictable.

Plus, these undefined behaviours are well-documented, even if easy to miss.

Whereas in LLMs, the whole thing is undefined behavior.

Re:The compiler was supposed to end programming too by kazinator on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @07:07PM (#50188910)
> Whereas in LLMs, the whole thing is undefined behavior.

Bingo!

When you exploit undefined behavior using a compiler, what do you do? You verify that its output, the object code, does what you intended with the undefined code. Or else you at least have to test the heck out of it.

Gee, what is all that similar to ...