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0 pointsglobular-toast24d ago0 comments

No, that is not true at all.

Natural language is natural because it's good for communicating with fellow humans. We have ways to express needs, wants, feelings, doubts, ideas etc. It is not at all "natural" to program a computer with the same language because those computers were not part of the development of the language.

Now, if we actually could develop a real natural language for programming that would be interesting. However, currently LLMs do not participate in natural language development. The development of the language is expected to have been done already prior to training.

Invented languages and codes are used everywhere. Chemical nomenclature, tyre sizes, mathematics. We could try to do that stuff in "natural" language, but it would be considered a serious regression. We develop these things because they empower us to think in ways that aren't "natural" and free our minds to focus on the problem at hand.

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skeledrew24d ago

Natural languages are "natural" because they evolved as the de facto way for humans to communicate. Doesn't need to be with fellow humans, but humans were all we've been able to communicate with over our ~300,000 years of existence as a species. And we've done it in thousands of varieties.

> currently LLMs do not participate in natural language development

It's quite literally what LLMs are trained on. You create the core architecture, and then throw terabytes of human-generated text at it until a model that works with said text results. Doesn't matter if it participates in language development or not, it only matters that humans can communicate with it "naturally".

> Invented languages and codes

All languages are invented; the only difference is how conscious and deliberate the process was, which is a function of intended purpose. Just look at Esperanto. Or Valyrian.

globular-toastOP24d ago

A natural language is a living thing. Every day each speaker adjusts his model a tiny bit. This has advantages but also some serious disadvantages which is why technical writers are very careful to use only a small subset of the language in their writing.

For true natural language programming we'd need to develop a language for reliably describing programs, but this doesn't exist in the language, so why would it exist in the LLM models? It will never exist, unless we invent it, which is, of course, exactly what programming languages are.

Natural languages are not invented. Written scripts are said to be invented, but nobody says a natural language like English or French is invented. It just happened, naturally, as the name suggests.

If natural language were the end goal then mathematics and music would use it too. There's nothing stopping them.

skeledrew24d ago

> For true natural language programming we'd need to develop a language for reliably describing programs

We really don't. Eventually we won't even be programming anymore per se. Consider communicating with someone who isn't fluent in any language you know, and vice versa. In the beginning you need to use a pretty restricted vocabulary set so you understand each other, similar to a programming language. But over time as communication continues, that vocabulary set grows and things become increasingly "natural", and it's easier for you to "program" each other.

Same with LLMs. We just need to get to the point where a model has sufficient user context (as it already has all the vocabulary) for effective communication. Like OpenClaw is currently accessing enough context for enough use cases that its popularity is through the roof. Tell it to do something, and as long as it has access to the relevant tools and services, it just gets it done. All naturally.

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0 pointsglobular-toast24d ago0 comments

No, that is not true at all.

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skeledrew24d ago

> currently LLMs do not participate in natural language development

> Invented languages and codes

All languages are invented; the only difference is how conscious and deliberate the process was, which is a function of intended purpose. Just look at Esperanto. Or Valyrian.

globular-toastOP24d ago

Natural languages are not invented. Written scripts are said to be invented, but nobody says a natural language like English or French is invented. It just happened, naturally, as the name suggests.

If natural language were the end goal then mathematics and music would use it too. There's nothing stopping them.

skeledrew24d ago

> For true natural language programming we'd need to develop a language for reliably describing programs

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