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by pmohun
2018 days ago
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I would go a step further, and say that prompt design will become an important sector of programming. Modern language models (eg GPT-3 et al) offer the capability to take a natural language input, match it against the context of the sentence, then propose a query that is understandable to the layperson. This abstraction allows us to understand the problem better, rather than just analyzing the way the problem manifests itself in code. Having a programming language that mirrors our everyday communication is an important step forward in making the innovations from software broadly available. The next wave of programmers will need to understand how human language can be used to efficiently guide models to solve problems that can’t be solved by human-written code. This is a big challenge, and we’re just at the very beginning of it, but I think it will open up new and undiscovered ways to create value in the world. I have quite a few additional thoughts on the topic which I’ve captured here: https://sundayscaries.substack.com/p/whos-the-real-expert |
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I don't think that's the case at all. Mathematics developed a formalised non-natural language precisely because human language is completely unsuitable for expressing abstract concepts in a concise and unambiguous fashion.
You will find that even in non-technical fields language will quickly converge to a well-defined, coarse and highly coded subset of regular human language when efficiency and correctness are key. You can observe this in the different branches of military, medicine, and trades.
We use programming to formalise algorithms, processes, and models. Those are abstract concepts and the difficulty doesn't lie in expressing them verbally. This has been shown time and again by fruitless efforts to create localised dialects of more accessible programming languages like BASIC or Pascal.
Turns out it doesn't matter whether keywords are written in your native language or if you could write natural language-like sentences: the difficult part remained formalising the abstract concept and ideas in a meaningful, logical and sound way.
What I do think will help tremendously, however, is using system such as GPT-3 to create another level of abstraction. There are many descriptive tasks that don't need to be put into code manually. The structure and behaviour of UIs comes to mind.