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Comment by psunavy03 | Hacker News Reader

People have been talking about natural language becoming a programming language for way longer than even Jensen Huang has been talking about it. Once upon a time, they tried to adapt natural language into a programming language, and they came up with this thing called COBOL. Same idea: "then the managers can code, and we won't need to hire so many expensive devs!"

And now the COBOL devs are retiring after a whole career . . .

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But isn't it actually more like, COBOL lets you talk in COBOL-ese (which is kinda stilted), whereas LLMs let you talk in LLM-ese (which gets a lot closer to actual language)? And then since the skill cap on language is basically infinite, that this becomes a question of how good you are at saying what you want - to the extent it intersects with what the LLM can do.

COBOL was the best attempt that they could get to in the 1960s. It's the entire reason COBOL has things like paragraphs, things end with periods, etc. They wanted as much of an "English-like syntax" as possible.

The reason it looks so odd today is that so much of modern software is instead the intellectual heir of C.

And yeah, the "skill cap" of describing things is theoretically infinite. My point was this has been tried before and we don't yet know how the actual limitations of an LLM come close to that ideal. People have been trying for decades to describe things in English that still ultimately need to be described in code for them to work; that's why the software industry exists in the first place.

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