LLM Inevitabilism

People like communicating in natural language.

LLMs are the first step in the movement away from the "early days" of computing where you needed to learn the logic based language and interface of computers to interact with them.

That is where the inevitabilism comes from. No one* wants to learn how to use a computer, they want it to be another entity that they can just talk to.

*I'm rounding off the <5% who deeply love computers.

Spoken language is a miserable language to communicate in for programming. It’s one of the major detractors of LLMs.

Programming languages have a level of specification orders of magnitude greater than human communication ones.

Computer scientists in the ~1970s said that procedural languages are a miserable medium for programming, compared to assembly languages.

And they said in the ~1960s that assembly languages are a miserable medium for programming, compared to machine languages.

(Ditto for every other language paradigm under the sun since then, particularly object-oriented languages and interpreted languages).

I agree that natural languages are a miserable medium for programming, compared to procedural / object-oriented / functional / declarative languages. But maybe I only agree because I'm a computer scientist from the ~2010s!

I don't think that's the only difference - every "leap" in languages you mentioned was an increase in the level of abstraction, but no change in the fact that the medium was still deterministic.

Programming in natural languages breaks that mold by adding nondeterminism and multiple interpretations into the mix.

Not saying it will never happen - just saying that I don't think it's "only" because you're a computer scientist from the 2010s that you find natural languages to be a poor medium for programming.