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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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These two statements are distinct:

- 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.

>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.

> Natural language programming, or natural language processing, as it was called

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.

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