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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

The article presupposes that ML is only for code generation but not maintenance. Why couldn't this change in the future? Perhaps you'd have an english language document that describes the functionality, and as you update it, the code gets re-generated or updated.

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Wouldn't that be strictly worse than specifying the functionality in code? The reason we've invented programming languages is because natural language is ambiguous and imprecise.

Consider the instructions "take a list, add the number three and five, return the list"

This compiles to both

  f(list):
    3+5;
    return list;

and

  f(list):
    list.add(3&5);
    return list;

and

  f(list):
    list.add(3);
    list.add(5);
    return list;

Decoding this type of vague descriptions is something human programmers struggle with, often resulting in a discussion with whoever wrote the requirements about just what the requirements say (sometimes they don't know and it needs to be worked out).

> This compiles to both

[three code segments]

Did you intentionally do an off-by-one error?

Not really, but it furthers my point about natural language being imprecise. Even the grammatical rules are ambiguous and frequently broken.

It's as they say: Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.

I agree with you, and in fact I think that initial code generation like CoPilot is strictly worse as well. But I'm discussing something orthogonal to code quality here.

This is an interesting thought. Kinda analogous to when you e.g. change your C++ code and the new assembly code is generated.

If there was high-level intent (e.g. something like spec language) that was preserved and versioned, that might be possible I guess.

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