Remix.run Logo
kenjackson 3 hours ago

That is absurd as a suggestion of it being the entire point of programming. In fact, it goes back to my original point - I have no idea why Djikstrs would say something so non-sensical, and likely neither did he.

Barrin92 2 hours ago | parent [-]

what do you mean "likely neither did he", I literally linked you the piece in which he said it. And of course he of all people would make that (correct) point, because he was always the strongest advocate of the virtue of formal correctness of programming languages, again from his article:

"A short look at the history of mathematics shows how justified this challenge is. Greek mathematics got stuck because it remained a verbal, pictorial activity, Moslem "algebra", after a timid attempt at symbolism, died when it returned to the rhetoric style, and the modern civilized world could only emerge —for better or for worse— when Western Europe could free itself from the fetters of medieval scholasticism —a vain attempt at verbal precision!— thanks to the carefully, or at least consciously designed formal symbolisms that we owe to people like Vieta, Descartes, Leibniz, and (later) Boole."

LLMs are nothing else but the exact reversal of this. To go from the system of computation that Boole gave you to treating your computer like a genie you perform incantations on, it's literally sending you back to the medieval age.