[disgruntledphd2]

The really depressing part about LLMs (and the limitations of ML more generally) is that humans are really bad at formal logic (which is what programming basically is), and instead of continuing the path of making machines that made it harder for us to get it wrong, we instead decided to toss every open piece of code/text in existence into a big machine that then reproduces those patterns non-deterministically and use that to build more programs.

One can see the results in a place where most code is terrible (data science is the place I see this most, as it's what I do mostly) but most people don't realise this. I assume this also happens for stuff like frontend, where I don't see the badness because I'm not an expert.

[CaptainOfCoit]

> is that humans are really bad at formal logic (which is what programming basically is),

The tricky part is that I don't think all programming is formal logic at all, just a small part. And this thing with that different code is for different purposes really screws up LLMs reasoning process unless you make it really clear what code is for what.

[bpt3]

> The tricky part is that I don't think all programming is formal logic at all, just a small part.

Why do you say this? The foundation of all of computer science is formal logic and symbolic logic.

[CaptainOfCoit]

Lots of parts are more creative or more "for humans" I might say, like building the right abstractions considering the current context and potentially future contexts. There is no "right/wrong" abstractions, just abstractions with different tradeoffs, and lots of things in programming is like this, not a binary "this is correct, this is wrong", but somewhere along a spectrum of "This is what I subjectively prefer considering these tradeoffs".

There is a reason a lot of programmers see programming having lots of similarities with painting and other creative activities.

[bpt3]

Any programmer who doesn't understand the basis of their craft and the environment they're working in isn't a very good one imo.

[CaptainOfCoit]

Problem is that everyone probably agrees with that, but where the line of "the basis" is drawn isn't so widely agree on. Is "the basis" the physical composition of the hardware components? Understanding assembly? Knowing how a CPU works? How electrons move around inside the whole thing? How all the pieces fit together, including the OS?

The space is just so large that everyone has their own "basis" that sometimes even move with time. They can still be good programmers imo.

[bpt3]

At least part of the basis for every programmer is formal logic. A systems programmer should understand how a CPU works, and a frontend JS developer should know how their target browser works, but they all need to know formal logic.

[wredcoll]

> Why do you say this? The foundation of all of computer science is formal logic and symbolic logic.

Yes, but also it has to deal with "the real world" which is only logical if you can encode a near infinite number of variables, instead we create leaky abstractions in order to actually get work done.

[bpt3]

And those abstractions need to be encoded using symbolic and formal logic.

[ahazred8ta]

We basically throw rigor out the window and hope it doesn't hit anybody on the way down.