[brundolf]

Amazing that there's no mention of AI in this post. People have been trying and failing to blur this line since the beginning of computing, and the only real success story has been excel. And it's because rigid computing systems have to draw a line somewhere between user and developer, and if that line is in the wrong place, people will either get hampered or lost. And the correct threshold is different for every user and use-case

AI is going to finally be the realization of this dream. I don't think it could have happened any other way

[skydhash]

And the main reason excel works is because it's very tangible. Referencing by cell address is obvious in ways declaring variables isn't. And the formula style is similar to the f(x) we learned in high school. And they are domain primitives instead of weird things like main() or sys.exit().

But most people don't like to program. They want to use their computer to do a task. And maybe they think of a novel way to do the task, but it's not a daily or even monthly occurrence. And even then they lack the training to fully specify their ideas (it's tedious for a reason). And from what I've seen, almost no one wants to spend the day trying to get it out a probability machine.

[brundolf]

You're spot-on that excel managed to break through because it's one of the few kinds of rigidness that was both legible and familiar enough to the average person. But very little else is, because the average person doesn't think in precision.

> they lack the training to fully specify their ideas (it's tedious for a reason)

> almost no one wants to spend the day trying to get it out a probability machine

These are opposing statements. What AI does best is taking fuzziness or under-specification and making sense out of it. For the first time in history, computers don't need precise instruction to be useful.

[skydhash]

> For the first time in history, computers don't need precise instruction to be useful.

They still do. What we've done mostly is extracting common meaning out of textual languages so that we can map out a prompt to an interpretation. But the issue is that a single sentence can have many and some are plainly wrong. The training data is also not so clean.

The computer is still using precise instructions. Now we only have a mapping program that's using probability and weights to match natural languages to those instructions with no limit on the gap between what it chooses and what was needed (aka error).

The standard way was to have the idea going through multiple people (or persona), each refining it until it's precise enough to be done by a computer. Yes, the final result, the program, is restrictive. But like checklist, the dependability matters more than creative flexibility. Especially in cases like "Transfer N dollars from account X to account Y". You don't want LLMs to decide it's fine for N to be negative or for N to be greater than the balance of account X.

[nylonstrung]

Excel is so usable because that rigidity eliminates an entire class of bugs

No race conditions, no side effects, no confusing state to debug

Functional languages like Nix is also extremely inflexible by design but there we recognize it as a "smart" feature, not a "dumb" limitation

[kragen]

Excel isn't the only one; Hypercard, Filemaker Plus, askSam, Emacs, the Unix shell, SAS, R, SQL, Microsoft Access, Visual BASIC, HTML, PHP, ... and maybe even APL, RPG-II, PowerBuilder, and COBOL.

It's hard to tell what will happen with AI.

[jynelson]

AI papers over underlying problems, it’s a very strong force to reinforce the status quo. i don’t have strong feelings about AI, but i feel like “the AI generates a terminal command line for you” is just not going to work, it only deepens the division between users who have to blindly trust it isn’t hallucinating and programmers who can check it’s correct. (and most people won’t think to use it in this way anyway because they’ve never heard of a terminal before.)