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I don’t think anyone disagrees that identifiers are labels. If you’re claiming that these labels are unimportant, I’d be interested in why you think this.

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Identifiers are super important and should be chosen wisely, but a C program with English identifiers is still a C program, while an LLM prompt is in fact NL and a whole new layer of that between your brain and the bytes. Which is why I think that saying "we already put NL between us and the bytes" minimizes that difference and is a bad take.

Exactly.

Not to mention that our existing programming languages have a deterministic output given the same code and the same compiler.

LLMs do not.

Thus, LLM prompts are an entirely different class of tool than a programming language.

This should be obvious to anyone who has written code, but alas.

Ooh. Good point. I guess we need traditional languages as a way to debug the created machine code. But… what if we didn’t? Ie the LLM made bytecode and we had some better way to talk about the concrete implementation.

They mostly aren't important though. When I first learned Pascal, JavaScript and PHP as a child, I had barely any idea what all those English words meant. Later on, when I was learning English in middle school, I was remembering their meanings by recalling what they do in code.

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