Hacker News Reader

Comment by wasabi991011 | Hacker News Reader

No, that is a terrible analogy. High level languages are deterministic, fully specified, non-leaky abstractions. You can write C and know for a fact what you are instructing the computer to do. This is not true for LLMs.

View on HN

I was going to start this with "C's fine, but consider more broadly: one reason I dislike reactive programming is that the magic doesn't work reliably and the plumbing is harder to read than doing it all manually", but then I realised:

While one can in principle learn C as well as you say, in practice there's loads of cases of people getting surprised by undefined behaviour and all the famous classes of bug that C has.

There is still the important difference that you can reason with precision about a C implementation’s behavior, based on the C standard and the compiler and library documentation, or its source or machine code when needed. You can’t do that type of reasoning for LLMs, or only to a very limited extent.

Maybe, but buffer overflows would occur written in assembler written by experts as well. C is a fine portable assembler (could probably be better with the knowledge we have now) but programming is hard. My point: you can roughly expect an expert C programmer to produce as many bugs per unit of functionality as an expert assembly programmer.

I believe it to be likely that the C programmer would even writes the code faster and better because of the useful abstractions. An LLM will certainly write the code faster but it will contain more bugs (IME).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com