There is nonetheless something extremely valuable about being able to write at different levels of abstraction when developing code.
Copilot lets you do that in a way that is way beyond what a normal programming language would let you do, which of course has its own, very rigid, abstractions.
For some parts of the code you'll want to dive in and write every single line in painstaking detail. For others `# give me the industry standard analysis of this dataset` is maybe enough for your purposes. And being able to have that ability, even if you think of it as just another programming language in itself, is huge.
Programming languages have syntax and semantics, while text-generators are statistical. So I wouldn't call them a programming language, since "having well-defined semantics" is more fundamental than "is often used in an edit->run loop".
What makes it inefficient?
It is verbose and similar to natural language. Given that code is more often read than written, isn't the code that is easier to understand more efficient?
Copilot lets you do that in a way that is way beyond what a normal programming language would let you do, which of course has its own, very rigid, abstractions.
For some parts of the code you'll want to dive in and write every single line in painstaking detail. For others `# give me the industry standard analysis of this dataset` is maybe enough for your purposes. And being able to have that ability, even if you think of it as just another programming language in itself, is huge.