Comment by pjmlp
Comment by pjmlp 2 months ago
I think people are still fooling themselves about the relevance of 3GL languages in an AI dominated future.
It is similar to how Assembly developers thought about their relevance until optimising compilers backends turned that into a niche activity.
It is a matter of time, maybe a decade who knows, until we can produce executables directly from AI systems.
Most likely we will still need some kind of formalisation tools to tame natural language uncertainties, however most certainly they won't be Python/Rust like.
We are moving into another abstraction layer, closer to the 4GL, CASE tooling dreams.
"Since FORTRAN should virtually eliminate coding and debugging…" -- FORTRAN report, 1954 [1]
If, as you seem to imply and as others have stated, we should no longer even look at the "generated" code, then the LLM prompts are the programs / programming language.
I can't think of a worse programming language, and I am not the only one [2]
However, it does indicate that our current programming languages are way to low-level, too verbose. Maybe we should fix that?
[1] http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/BackusE...
[2] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...
[3] https://objective.st/