[mediaman]

If you make the example any more complicated, it makes sense.

A lathe operator isn’t any good if they don’t frequently operate lathes.

A articulated robot implementer needs frequent experience implementing robots to be any good.

That doesn’t mean lathes or robots are useless. Nor does it mean they have failed as products because they require expertise.

I do think it raises questions as to whether vast swathes of the population will be effective at using LLMs. Are they scissors, or a lathe?

[Kim_Bruning]

I figure english is the next coolest programming language for scripting and compilation. So far people have been writing fun little demos with it, but now people are starting to place real demands on it, and you're starting to see actual programs needing to be built. Unsurprisingly this requires a bit more craft.

[oblio]

> I figure english is the next coolest programming language for scripting and compilation. So far people have been writing fun little demos with it, but now people are starting to place real demands on it, and you're starting to see actual programs needing to be built. Unsurprisingly this requires a bit more craft.

Perhaps that craft of using the exact subset of English has something to do with the correct selection of words and concise, yet expressive enough, expressions, in a fashion resembling creating a code.

A code that's meant to be understood by machines, we could call it "computer code". And said computer code could be used to create recipes, algorithms, let's call them "programs". Hey, I think I have ideas for 2 possible names for this process!

[Kim_Bruning]

No wait, you think I'm being silly so that's why you're being a bit sarcastic back.

But seriously, you can put a shebang on an english text file now (if you're sufficiently brave), or feed it through something that spits out code on the other end (so you can proof read the consequences before executing them).

It's crazy, but this is 2026, and that actually ... just works. You can even do it locally, if you don't mind running a space heater.

Thing is, when you have the expressiveness and power of a full natural language (and you're already paying for it), why would you want to constrain yourself to a subset? That's not very practical. Why not use all of it? Computing was never about typing code into machines anyway. "Computer" used to be a human profession, until it got automated.

On the upside, there's thousands of years of documentation. On the downside, a lot said documentation is underspecified and/or straight wishful thinking. It's certainly an interesting avenue to explore.

[oblio]

> why would you want to constrain yourself to a subset? That's not very practical. Why not use all of it?

For the same reason math, physics, chemistry, etc figured out a long time ago that Koine Greek, Latin, French, German, English, etc aren't the best languages for science. Constraint gives focus, precision.

If you code novels, knock yourself out.

[Kim_Bruning]

Let's actually look at this as if I'm serious for a second? Tell me this framing really can't work.

None-exhaustively:

Python has if, for, while, def, class and first class lists, dicts , functions ;

Forth has this stack machine concept, RPN, compilation-in-the-REPL when defining new functions.

Lisp has this code is data is code concept, and CAR, CDR, first class lists (obviously ), first class functions (in some of them) ... etc.

Machine code can (theoretically) be directly expressed in logic gates.

How about a quick look at what English supports:

Conditionals, iteration, abstraction, composition, delegation, exception handling, scope, naming, modularity; intent, priority, graduated precision, analogy, context-dependence; And.. the concept of semantic triples is built in as a syntactic primitive (subject-predicate-object), so you can even do a bunch of GOFAI right off the bat.

It's weird thinking of english as a programming language. But it kind of works like one if you want to, and computers can process it now?

[oblio]

I'm not saying English (or any other natural language) is not usable. It is, since it's a more complex language than programming language. All natural languages are supersets of current programming languages.

I'm talking about the opposite problem: these supersets are ambiguous, contradictory, vague. At the end of the day the thing that is programmed needs to be clear, unambiguous and ideally concise, too (performance in its million incarnations).

So yeah, I guess you can fix the ambiguous aspect with verbosity. Just write more words until you define everything you need to define more directly when using a formal language.

I would be extremely shocked if programming wouldn't require knowing a very specific, albeit huge, domain jargon.

[Kim_Bruning]

In a semi-random sample of 10 recent articles on arxiv.org, 10 articles (100%) contained english language as the predominant part of the corpus. Where necessary mathematical notation was included.

So - you're not wrong that eg. mathematical notation is (often) used, as we both very well know. But English is really quite prominent!

And now computers can process both, where before they couldn't.

The engineering doesn't go away, not yet. Decomposition, abstraction, state management, blast radius containment O:-) . But now you can express much more of that in the language the arxiv papers are already written in.

[simonw]

> But seriously, you can put a shebang on an english text file now (if you're sufficiently brave)

That inspired me to figure out how to do exactly that:

https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/llm-shebang

  #!/usr/bin/env -S llm -f
  Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle

Thanks for the inspiration!

[wfurney]

A .llm file extension might be in order :)

[Kim_Bruning]

Oh, that looks pretty clean!

[oblio]

> But seriously, you can put a shebang on an english text file now (if you're sufficiently brave), or feed it through something that spits out code on the other end (so you can proof read the consequences before executing them).

The funky thing is that it's not just English. I could vibe code in Romanian, it would probably be hilarious :-)) Probably not for whomever would have to take over the app, though.

[Kim_Bruning]

Eh? You should go for it! Do everything at least once, right? Pick some simple pet project, and get it off your bucket list!

If it wasn't on your bucket list to begin with, who cares: Now you can add it and complete it in one fell swoop ;-)

[wfurney]

Everybody seems to want them to be scissors, or at least to treat them as such, but even still the reason everyone can use scissors so well is because they’ve practiced with them, right? You’re probably a lot better at using scissors now than the first time you did it, the functionality is just so simple it’s harder to notice.

To me learning to use LLMs is the same as doing anything else, you have to practice and put in the hours to get good. Maybe some harnesses will eventually allow LLMs to function more as scissors than lathes. This seems to be what Microsoft is trying to do by embedding Copilot in all their products and saying “choose the UI that works best for you”. If that doesn’t end up working we’ll need another paradigm for “non-technical” users to effectively operate computer assistants