Programming Is Linguistically Immortal, or Why Programming Languages Are Here to Stay
Posted by derjanni@reddit | programming | View on Reddit | 55 comments
arthurno1@reddit
I have to admit I stopped reading after that example with math and C. I think those mathematical formulas can as well be a programming language. I don't really agree the example proves that C is somehow bigger than those formulas.
The idea that there is something immortal in software industry I think is a bit stretching it. Algorithms (mathematics) > programming languages, because we can construct a program in any language as after the same algorithm. Programming languages are certainly not immortal. They live only as long as the software written in them is useful. Once your last Cobol program is no longer useful, Cobol will be practically dead. For most programmers living today, Cobol is practically already a dead language.
But not even algorithms are immortal. Even algorithms die, once we construct better one or the problem they solve is no longer practically interesting to anyone.
These things are just tools, for us to solve some problem. As all tools, they are replaced with better ones as we are constantly trying to make our lives easier and more comfortable. That perhaps is immortal, our struggle to survive and make our lives better. Everything else is just a tool to facilitate that struggle. Computers and programming languages to go with them, certainly are that: just tools.
Kok_Nikol@reddit
I would also add, compared to other fields, software engineering is very young. It's very hard to tell where stuff is going.
arthurno1@reddit
Indeed, I usually say that too. Just look at mathematics and physics. Took us thousands of years to get where we are today, and there is still a lot left to discover.
Kok_Nikol@reddit
I hope comp sci will be like that, and that all the predictions about the end are wrong :')
arthurno1@reddit
There is only one thing about future we know for sure, is that it never turns as predicted :). Just watch all those old TV programs from 50's and 60's about how future will look like. It is nothing even close to what they predicted.
Kok_Nikol@reddit
Heh, yes!
It's very amusing reading news even from only a year ago, 99.99% is complete garbage or of extremely little value, meaning I could have saved brain space and just ignored it.
tariandeath@reddit
With cost of tokens becoming more of a concern I am now considering a token optimized language to prompt LLMs and tailor their output.
Resource_account@reddit
which has a shorter shelf life, a programming language or a spoken one? At least when a dictionary ships an update, nobody’s prod code breaks.
Leihd@reddit
Terrible analogy when software also has updates, and code breaks.
Resource_account@reddit
That was my point.
Leihd@reddit
Whoops, my bad.
programming-ModTeam@reddit
Your post or comment was removed for the following reason or reasons:
LLM-related content is banned from r/Programming.
AndyKJMehta@reddit
The fact that machines now have to communicate in literal English tells us we definitely fkd up somewhere!
PedanticDilettante@reddit
I thought for a moment the title said 'Immoral' and was very confused.
Kok_Nikol@reddit
Well it depends on the language you see...
backfire10z@reddit
Who is making this claim?
derjanni@reddit (OP)
Jensen Huang (NVIDIA) claiming that we’ll all use spoken English instead of actual programming languages.
314kabinet@reddit
I really don’t see why we must write refutations of obvious marketing fluff. Those who can read the message already agree with it.
Chickenfrend@reddit
A principal engineer on my team believes we might all work by writing specs and not code in the future.
SanityInAnarchy@reddit
Because our bosses believe the obvious marketing fluff.
Literally anyone I can cite to try to walk them away from the ledge helps.
garanvor@reddit
Snake oil salesman says we’ll all be drinking snake oil. More news at 11.
neutronium@reddit
TIL you're supposed to drink it. Always thought you just rubbed it on.
ForgettableUsername@reddit
That’s like the one they used to say about how in the future you’ll just take a pill instead of eating a meal: Even if it were a true prediction of the future, who would want it?
AreWeNotDoinPhrasing@reddit
Me! I would love to disassociate the dopamine fix of food
dragenn@reddit
func GetRich(): BigMoney { return do().the().thing(); }
TankorSmash@reddit
Presumably one day, we'll get to the point where plain English will be enough to vibecode an entire app, start to finish. There'd be enough in the latent space to understand the spec, and all the expectations and market etc.
jk147@reddit
Latent space.. you mean hallucination.
ChilledRoland@reddit
– Alan J. Perlis
TankorSmash@reddit
I don't know if that'll stand when its the far future and LLMs contain multitudes
Nova711@reddit
Unless the machine can literally ready your mind, any prompt you give it is going to not capture what you want it to make. This does not depend on the machine, it is due to ambiguity in language. The process of removing this ambiguity will turn whatever language you are using into what is basically an ad-hoc programming language.
derjanni@reddit (OP)
This is essentially the tl;dr of the article
Muhznit@reddit
There already was a time when English was used to code entire apps.
It was 1970, when COBOL was the most popular language and noted for having a syntax that was close to English. There's reasons we moved on.
jackalopeDev@reddit
there is to much ambiguity there to have that ever be as effective or correct as a modern language could be.
zackel_flac@reddit
No you can't. Does your calculator needs to support roman digits, Chinese ones, Arabic ones?
You see how English in itself is limited and lack the formalism programming language bring to the table.
TankorSmash@reddit
Mine wouldn't!
anengineerandacat@reddit
His claim was that we wouldn't write code anymore, which at least for the SWE space is generally pretty true; you simply design with assistance, monitor and resolve gaps on the implementation, and review. You'll likely guide the agent on resolving or cleaning up mistakes but it's usually slower to resolve them yourself due to mistakes often occuring across the code base as it's ultimately a gap in the specs the AI hallucinated a solution for.
If you think I am lying I'll legit dump in a design, requirements, and task set you can point any competent agent and it'll crank out the entire stack in 30-40 minutes and maybe like 150~ credits.
The bigger blocker for unmanaged languages is they generally have less available training data and libraries that are closed or poorly documented but that's likely a community issue that'll get addressed as folks port legacy code to make it more useful for AI to build on (some enterprises are investing into these tools as automation solutions to lower long term costs).
Same goes for like database designs and such as well, often IP for organizations so not widely documented what is working for highly scaleable solutions.
TL;DR Software Engineering isn't dead or dying but coding itself has an unknown future now.
Subsector3990@reddit
The author is refusing to engage with anybody calling out this inconsistency in their argument
backfire10z@reddit
We’ll be using spoken English, but that doesn’t mean programming languages will cease to exist. LLMs are still converting that spoken English into a programming language.
Maybe I’m overly hung up on your specific wording.
chat-lu@reddit
In Jensen Huang’s theoretical and nonsensical future, compilers would compile from English to binaries.
inigohr@reddit
and that is a very different claim than what the author is attempting to refute. one is plausible if unlikely, the other (which the article is arguing against) is nonsensical.
chat-lu@reddit
The article is pointless because Huang’s nonsense needs no response.
inigohr@reddit
in my opinion, you're arguing against a strawman. nobody serious has said code is just going to disappear because of AI, the claim they may try to defend is that we as humans will no longer need to manually write code, as we can express our intentions as natural language and have those translated into the formal jargon of code (this is still debatable, but is at least defensible).
there's a difference between how we express the things we want and how those get translated into the formal code. I don't think you meaningfully engaged with this distinction, you're arguing against a point nobody is actually making.
vytah@reddit
So he should delete all code files from NVIDIA's repos and replace them with prompts. And add
*.c*.h*.cppto the.gitignoreso no low-level code ever pollutes his product.mrunleaded@reddit
i dont think programming languages are dead any more than Java byte code or assembly are “dead”. I was thinking about this the other day and you could argue that natural languages are just a higher lever abstraction over a typical programming language in the same way Java is a higher level language over Java byte code is.
It might be with all this AI we write specifications in English and an LLM “compiles” that into Java or C or whatever programming language. If nothing else is an interesting thought experiment.
jonathancast@reddit
You could argue that, if you had no idea how the semantics of either programming languages or natural languages work.
In reality, natural languages are a lot like LLMs - they're stochastic processes not really intended to be precise or accurate. Feeding that into a computer is a terrifying prospect.
Tornado547@reddit
Every time there's a significant advance in natural language processing people claim that the programming language is dead and we're going to start writing our code in english. It's very plausible that that will be correct eventually but very unlikely that that will be correct for this particular shift
BusinessWatercrees58@reddit
I've got coworkers making claims like this. Or that LLM's will use a programming language optimized for them that humans will rarely need to read manually.
Subsector3990@reddit
I've got coworkers claiming the earth is flat and seed oils make you gay.
teknikly-correct@reddit
do we work at the same place?
turtleship_2006@reddit
I wonder if they know what bytecode or assembly is
liquidbreakfast@reddit
did you only read the first sentence?
Shadowolf7@reddit
Don't listen to anyone about tech who has a business degree.
SplendidPunkinButter@reddit
If programming is dead, why doesn’t Claude generate byte code from your prompts?
BusinessWatercrees58@reddit
I like the optimism in this take and I kinda share it. All we've done is move up a level of abstraction. Developers of tomorrow won't be as good as developers of today, but that's no different than it is now. We aren't as technically strong as those who came before us, but we can do a lot more, and we still have jobs. There's more to do, and someone has to be paid to do it/be fireable if it's done wrong, even if doing it means guiding an LLM to build it.
TankorSmash@reddit
https://programmers.fyi/ is busted, and I'm pretty sure URL formatters are against reddiquette