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Comment by chton | Hacker News Reader

I expect this will lead to a whole new category of bugs: "I wasn't precise enough in saying what I wanted, so now the code doesn't do what it should."

Interesting technology, but I doubt it will ever replace or even be used in a proper piece of code.

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"I wasn't precise enough in saying what I wanted, so now the code doesn't do what it should." is not, in any sense, a new category of bugs.

You put in a query and get out some code. Concrete code not connected to the query anymore. The code doesn't shift out from under you later, if that's what you're implying.

Why wouldn't it be used in a "proper piece of code"? You ask Visual Studio/XCode/Eclipse for something and it gives you back a snippet that you can use as a starting point.

But it would be a good alternative to bash one-liners.

oh absolutely, if they can get it general enough to do that. If they manage to include this in powershell (since it's MS), they could have the worlds greatest command line.

"Get all current running processes, select the ones that use over 5% CPU, and display them to me sorted descending by CPU usage"

More verbose than the normal, but damn it would make things easier for the non-initiated.

The danger is that you wind up with another AppleScript - something that might read more easily for the non-initiated, but is no easier to write, because it only accepts one particular finicky subset of natural language while dishonestly implying that it'll magically understand all of it.

I would hope that Microsoft is smarter and has learned from those mistakes. It does seem to be their intention to do it with full natural language processing. We'll have to wait and see.

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