this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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Programming
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Syntax has never really be an issue. The closest thing to plain english programming are legal documents and contracts. As you can see they are horrible to understand but that the only way to correctly specify exactly what you want. And code is much better at it. Another datapoint are visual languages like lego mindstorm or LabView. It's quite easy to do basic things, but it doesn't scale at all.
But it has tho.... For example, I do not know rust. I want to add the notifications functionality to Lemmy. Lemmy is in rust. To implement this relatively simply api, I need to learn rust to a degree. Then, I need to look at Lemmy's file structure to understand the project further to actually do what I want to do. What if this all could be abstracted by me simply saying "post xyz to the expo-notifications server whenever someone messages someone." An AI English-to-rust interpreter could easily do this.
This is what would define the smartness of the AI, wouldn't it? Your project manager doesn't tell you exactly what they want. You have the brains to interpret what they mean and do stuff accordingly, correct?
This requires many assumptions that you or any computational system have no formal reason to make. Having an interpreter that just guesstimates exactly how you want the program structured, is going to run into problems when you, say want to extend the program.