This is actually my biggest gripe with vibecoding. The single best feature of any programming language is that it is precise. And that is what we throw out?! I favor of natural language, of all things?! We're insane!
Any semi-competent AI Agent can do that with a plan you've written in 5 minutes.
I may be wrong, but it seems when people are talking about easy glue code, they’re talking about web services API, not OS API, not graphics or sound API, not file formats libraries,…
I know it's a piece of shit API done in the worst possible way on purpose (they don't want openness, but had to fulfill a law that mandates "openness") because I had previously tried to do it manually - twice. I ran out of whisky before I got anything done.
Sonnet _3.5_ almost one-shotted it with just the API "documentation" they had and access to Python and curl.
People have also hooked stuff into proprietary APIs on "smart" devices with zero documentation, just by having an Agent tirelessly run through thousands of permutations to figure it out.
Grandparent said:
> The single best feature of any programming language is that it is precise.
C overtook a more precise language family because it has features other than precision that people cared about. Perhaps a better tradeoff of expressiveness and readability with precision.
Grandparent could be correct, and precision is the best feature of C, despite being less precise than ASM. And its better expressiveness nets out to a better overall programmer experience. I just wanted to point out that precision is something we do trade away for other things we want.
To me, the notion of precision isn't in any way related to whether any given statement is sound. It's about the behavior of the language for sound programs.
One could take the position that specifying precisely 'do whatever, I dunno' counts as perfectly precise. But then a language that was entirely UB would count as precise, which would be an odd position to hold, since you can't specify any behavior at all with it.
Now consider sound, in-spec C. Versus natural language.
Consider the subset of natural language that has strictly defined semantics. This would include, for example, talking in about the arithmetic of real numbers. The rest is not relevant to evaluating the precision of natural language.
Does that exclusion feel different in the natural language case? Why?
Perhaps it’s a matter of degree, not a categorical difference.
Not really, no. I just think we have better ways of expressing well-defined mathematical concepts like that than natural language when the recipient is a machine.
That's also where engineers come into play. They (and often only they) can judge how much precision is needed depending on the part of the system they are working on.
Your suggestion that because languages have specified undefined behaviour, they are somehow not precise, makes little sense.
Otherwise, we're just saying that the precise parts of the language are precise, which isn't much of a differentiator since it's similarly true for all languages.