If AI is natural language programming then they already had it in 1978, because AI is in fact "asking a programmer to write code for you". And you can even ask them to do it at different levels of abstraction!
IME LLMs often make reasonable assumptions, but sometimes they don't and you have to backtrack and say "No, what I meant was..."
When the process works it's almost magical because the LLM successfully anticipates your needs, and implements your request in a much fuller way than you might have done yourself.
When it doesn't it makes a mess you have to clean up.
But generally I've been impressed by how well the leading LLMs will Do The Thing from a brief description, interpolating useful and correct details without being told to.
Compilers don't work like that. They're translators, not (entry level) inventors with independent agency.
That would just be the "I" part, since was missing the A for artificial: you asked a naturally made person.
And yes, nobody argued that they didn't have I in 1978, so I'm not sure what the argument is supposed to prove.
I’m guessing it’s supposed to show that if you have to have arbitrary levels of intelligence to interpret natural language, then nothing’s changed between now and 1978 when considering whether “natural language programming” is a thing. Just because the intelligence is artificial now doesn’t really change the answer.
Not only it changes the aswer, it's literally the whole of the question. When people talked of the posibility or imposibility of “natural language programming” they *always* meant "natural language instructions which *a machine* translates to running code".
They didn't have to spell it out, since nobody doubted a human programmer can write code when given natural language instructions - that was already a thing since ENIAC, if not since Ada Lovelace.
That's what we have now, and that's what changed between now and 1978 when considering whether “natural language programming” is a thing.
- You can program in natural language
- You can tell an AI what to do in natural language, and it can gather requirements, sketch up a design, write code, search the web for error messages, and iterate on the program until it works.
For certain things people care about, they’re equivalent (I tell the computer what I want and out pops a program) but for certain other things, they’re absolutely not (natural language doesn’t map deterministically into machine instructions.)
When people talked about natural language programming decades ago, they were talking about a system that compiles natural language into machine code. They weren’t talking about a system that autonomously gathers requirements, decides what frameworks to use, searches the web to look up error messages, iterates on ideas, etc… these things are so different from “natural language maps to machine code” that I don’t think we’re going to have a useful discussion if you think “I tell the computer what I want” is the only aspect of this worth looking at.
This confuses two things still:
People wanting to have natural language to machine code via AI, just AI that was implemented the way they thought was achievable then (symbolic AI).
People wanting to have natural language style programming language, similar to later AppleScript or some 4GL languages.
Natural language programming, or natural language processing, as it was called, was tied to the first, and the AI research of the time, from the beginning:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing
So, yeah, they didn't have LLMs, but they pretty much understood such a program or "compiler" would need to understand world facts and natural language to even work.
NLP has nothing to do with programming. The Wikipedia article you linked doesn’t even mention programming once. NLP is old-school AI like you get when you try and cram all language into an ontology and try to “parse” it in an unambiguous way. It’s how Siri worked from the beginning, and it’s a complete dead-end. (I have some background here, I was an engineer on Siri for over 10 years.)
The fact that a compiler using old-school NLP would need a complete understanding of the world and all relevant facts in order to make natural language “process-able” is the reason the whole thing was a failure and why LLM’s are needed to make the idea work. You can’t just go from “parsing language” to “make me a TODO list app” without having an arbitrarily intelligent system to understand all the relevant background that such a statement implies.
When people realized human-level intelligence is necessary to make natural language programming work, is basically when the idea died. And now we have LLM’s and (what many would define as) human level intelligence, and its ability to program is just one side effect of many of it being truly artificially intelligent.
There are a few little differences between human beings and computers that you should know about.
For example, humans are sentient, have agency and can be held accountable.
So when you give humans a bad spec, you can still get what you want, because, with some luck, you're simply delegating the task of thinking and making choices to another human, who, by the very premise, understands the language you are communicating in, and can work out your intents with you.
The whole "this meeting could've been an email" thing, you know.
That meeting could've been a pull request if whoever needed a thing to be done could figure it out on their own.
LLMs can be helpful for figuring things out, sure.
But "sudo make me a sandwich" style of vibe coding is just removing the obstacles to enshrining ambiguities and bad decisions in code.
I'm of the opinion that if you think it will stay this way you haven't been paying attention. "sudo find me a security flaw" already embarrasses top security researchers who have been working on the same code for decades. "sudo decompile this program/firmware/game" is doing absolute wondrous things right now even if there are still some flaws. If it can do these things better / significantly faster than humans already, and if it keeps improving at the rate it has been "sudo make me an operating system" that spits out something actually pretty good is probably within a decade.
The Kolmogorov complexity, at best, remains unchanged.
"sudo make an OS" is a different kind of transformation.
It's as much programming as downloading an Ubuntu image, and you don't need to wait a decade to do that.