With the AI hype, I've been seeing a lot of content lately about why AI will eliminate the need to learn/use programming languages. I will explain why I don't think so and the reasons why in the shortest possible way.
First of all, I would like to talk about why we use programming languages as human beings. Programming languages allow us to communicate with machines. In fact, each programming language is a different kind of bridge between us and machines.
For example, I want the computer to print “hello world” on the screen. for the computer "hello world" means:
0110100001100101...00100
I need to use a programming language to give the computer a command about these zeros and ones. And when I give a computer the input of this command, I should get the same output for every same input, so there should be nothing random happening here. Because when you get in an elevator you never want to go to a random floor. You press the button for the floor you want to go and you go to that floor. Because that's what the elevator is there for.
For example, in Python, this is how I give this command to the computer:
print("hello world")
Every time this code runs, I will see the same output on the screen with 100% probability. That's why we use calculators, mobile phones, computers: Accuracy.
The way LLMs work is different from this process. In short, LLMs predict the next word. And this prediction eliminates accuracy.
That's why I don't think that natural languages are the new languages we will communicate with machines.
I can understand the hype because you are asking questions to the AI and you are getting answers that seem to be very accurate or absolutely accurate. This looks really incredible. And it's a tool that can be useful to people. I'm not against it. But just to please investors, there is some obfuscation about what this tool is for and what it serves. The fact that AI can tell a joke that amuses you, draw a beautiful picture, write good code is not the opposite of you being able to do those things. I'm only talking about programming languages because I don't understand much about other topics, but this exaggeration is spreading to other fields as well.
Being able to read code is more important than being able to write code. When you are not very skilled in this area you can write code but you cannot read it. So the code written by AI means nothing unless you can read it. You are just breaking systems that work or creating broken systems.
"I built an app with AI and It works."
It works? Are you sure? should I spend my time or money on this app? Do you take responsibility for this app?
You cannot.
As a conclusion, my predictions on this topic will have no impact on the outcome. But accuracy I'm talking about is really accurate. Don't ignore this and read your code.
Written by untreu (Emir Yorulmaz) Return to Home