Have you ever asked an LLM to do the same task in different languages and gotten wildly different results? I mostly prompt in English, but I’ll switch to French sometimes, and it’s surprisingly hard to nail the exact same details and nuances. This quote from Jason Gorman got me thinking about it.
The hard part of computer programming isn’t expressing what we want the machine to do in code. The hard part is turning human thinking – with all its wooliness and ambiguity and contradictions – into computational thinking that is logically precise and unambiguous, and that can then be expressed formally in the syntax of a programming language.
This resonates with another personal experience. My second language is Dutch, and sometimes I can’t find the right French or English word for what I’m thinking, but Dutch nails it. Turns out that word just doesn’t translate literally to French or English.
Edgar Dijkstra called it nearly 50 years ago: we will never be programming in English, or French, or Spanish. Natural languages have not evolved to be precise enough and unambiguous enough. Semantic ambiguity and language entropy will always defeat this ambition.
Source: codemanship.wordpress.com