Comment by lcuff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lcuff | Hacker News Reader

I suspect as things evolve with the Large Language Models, there will be integration with existing computer languages and frameworks. That the ability to say "Create a web site using language X with framework Y" will become a reality. This ability to get Hello World done in 5 minutes instead of 1/2 a day to walk through a intro book/tutorial, well, that's a win.

Then, down the road, each AI might have a preferred/default language, technology and framework. Quite possibly newly created. This has a parallel to intermediate representations (the earliest of which I'm aware of is p-code in UCSD Pascal). But it is also analogous to compiling C to assembler, and then machine code. Similarly with Java. Wolfram is correct when he talks about needing it to be a representation that the creator can inspect and verify. Not necessarily the least bit easy with a complex project. It will be an engineering journey, but it does spark in me the hope that English (or anyone's native language) becomes the high level language of choice for guiding machines in tasks. Mathematica? Humph. Stephen Wolfram is very pleased with things he's thought of or perhaps synthesized, but I'm gonna say, I think Mathematica is not the generic solution we will want.

> I suspect as things evolve with the Large Language Models, there will be integration with existing computer languages and frameworks. That the ability to say "Create a web site using language X with framework Y" will become a reality.

So, I think a key challenge is that modern programming languages do 2 things simultaneously.

1. They provide direct instruction to computers.

2. They document precise human intent.

Even if the need for part 1 goes away, part 2 will always be with us. I would expect that if natural language programming becomes a thing, that a dialect forms - akin to legalese - that embodies best practices for precisely documenting human intent.

> I would expect that if natural language programming becomes a thing, that a dialect forms - akin to legalese - that embodies best practices for precisely documenting human intent.

Sort of like how the SQL syntax seems designed for business admin folks to use, but us programmers ended up using it.

I was going to say the same thing, we’ll all be YELLING OUT SQL to our mic terminals and syntactically backtracking from the expressiveness and imprecision of our dynamic typed languages of choice.

> Sort of like how the SQL syntax seems designed for business admin folks to use, but us programmers ended up using it.

So it seems that a declarative programming language would be a suitable target for LLM to generate.

Maybe someday there would be a popular, shared IR across models, like SQL does to relational database.

> This ability to get Hello World done in 5 minutes instead of 1/2 a day to walk through a intro book/tutorial, well, that's a win.

So a bit like `create-react-app` or `dotnet new` or such, but now powered by AI?*

Well, I haven't used either of those, so I can't comment on a comparison ... but the point is less 'powered by an ai' and more the fact that I'm using English, not the jargon of create-react-app or dotnet new or the rails version or the django version ... Right now, my experience programming with an AI is that I'm much better off asking for subroutines to do this and that, not ask for a complete architecture. Mostly for debugging reasons: When it doesn't work, I want the debugging to be manageable. Getting the AI to debug its own code has not been a productive path for me, but hopefully soon.

> This ability to get Hello World done in 5 minutes...

This has existed since at least 1992 (Visual C++) and probably before that (Borland Pascal?).

Well, I'm thinking more of a web site Hello World than a C++ Hello World. The original point of Hello World (per Kernighan and Ritchie) was to ensure that all the tools were installed (the compiler itself wasn't a given) and in your path and configured correctly. So yeah, I was say even in 1988 (when I started programming in C) there's a way in which Hello.c was 5 minutes. But when I started with Rails (years later), it was more like 1/2 a day, and the Hello World notion had expanded in scope by quite a bit. I didn't spell out the _kind_ of Hello World I had in mind. My bad.

Web hello world in rails is literally a single command and seconds.

After you read far enough in the book or tutorial to find that command.

Front end js is like the nest we've been building for it - not knowing why.

>Create a web site using language X with framework Y

Not sure if you played with chatGPT, but you can ALREADY ask it to do this and it will give you something that works 50% of the time.

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