Exactly. When I use a scissor, I don't want the scissor to not work just because I'm not a "frequent scissor user," and then get told by someone who makes their breakfast with scissors that I'm doing it wrong. Most people will not be "frequent" anything users.
Most people also understand that, because they're not "frequent" users of a thing, they absolutely suck at using it, and set their expectations accordingly. In particular, they realize that doing anything non-trivial with the thing requires them to spend some learning and practice time, or asking/hiring a "frequent" user to do it for them.
So the reasonable response to being told you're holding your scissors wrong is to realize that yes, you most likely are holding your scissors wrong[0], and ask the other person for advice (or just to do the thing), or look up a YouTube video and learn, or sign up to a class, or such.
Expecting mastery in 30 seconds is not a reasonable attitude, but it's unfortunately the lie that software industry tried to sell to people for the past 15 years or so.
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[0] - There's much more to it than one would think.
I’m interested in the “non-trivial” point as well, this seems to be a common refrain from the anti-LLM tech crowd, “LLMs aren’t good at doing anything non-trivial”, well is that really the case or is it just harder and one needs to put in more practice for more complicated tasks?
I don’t have an example off hand, but I know that it’s easy to dismiss something an LLM does as trivial if your work is extremely marginal. Most devs aren’t creating their own programming languages. I can’t help but think people who hold this opinion also think the work most software professionals do is “trivial” (“you’re just moving strings around, that’s not impressive/trivial”)
On the one hand there's simonw's concept of a "frequent LLM user" and then there's the actual vast majority of people using ChatGPT web app or one of the various Office CoPilots.
I figure english is the next coolest programming language for scripting and compilation. So far people have been writing fun little demos with it, but now people are starting to place real demands on it, and you're starting to see actual programs needing to be built. Unsurprisingly this requires a bit more craft.
> I figure english is the next coolest programming language for scripting and compilation. So far people have been writing fun little demos with it, but now people are starting to place real demands on it, and you're starting to see actual programs needing to be built. Unsurprisingly this requires a bit more craft.
Perhaps that craft of using the exact subset of English has something to do with the correct selection of words and concise, yet expressive enough, expressions, in a fashion resembling creating a code.
A code that's meant to be understood by machines, we could call it "computer code". And said computer code could be used to create recipes, algorithms, let's call them "programs". Hey, I think I have ideas for 2 possible names for this process!
No wait, you think I'm being silly so that's why you're being a bit sarcastic back.
But seriously, you can put a shebang on an english text file now (if you're sufficiently brave), or feed it through something that spits out code on the other end (so you can proof read the consequences before executing them).
It's crazy, but this is 2026, and that actually ... just works. You can even do it locally, if you don't mind running a space heater.
Thing is, when you have the expressiveness and power of a full natural language (and you're already paying for it), why would you want to constrain yourself to a subset? That's not very practical. Why not use all of it? Computing was never about typing code into machines anyway. "Computer" used to be a human profession, until it got automated.
On the upside, there's thousands of years of documentation. On the downside, a lot said documentation is underspecified and/or straight wishful thinking. It's certainly an interesting avenue to explore.
> why would you want to constrain yourself to a subset? That's not very practical. Why not use all of it?
For the same reason math, physics, chemistry, etc figured out a long time ago that Koine Greek, Latin, French, German, English, etc aren't the best languages for science. Constraint gives focus, precision.
Let's actually look at this as if I'm serious for a second? Tell me this framing really can't work.
None-exhaustively:
Python has if, for, while, def, class and first class lists, dicts , functions ;
Forth has this stack machine concept, RPN, compilation-in-the-REPL when defining new functions.
Lisp has this code is data is code concept, and CAR, CDR, first class lists (obviously ), first class functions (in some of them) ... etc.
Machine code can (theoretically) be directly expressed in logic gates.
How about a quick look at what English supports:
Conditionals, iteration, abstraction, composition, delegation, exception handling, scope, naming, modularity; intent, priority, graduated precision, analogy, context-dependence; And.. the concept of semantic triples is built in as a syntactic primitive (subject-predicate-object), so you can even do a bunch of GOFAI right off the bat.
It's weird thinking of english as a programming language. But it kind of works like one if you want to, and computers can process it now?
I'm not saying English (or any other natural language) is not usable. It is, since it's a more complex language than programming language. All natural languages are supersets of current programming languages.
I'm talking about the opposite problem: these supersets are ambiguous, contradictory, vague. At the end of the day the thing that is programmed needs to be clear, unambiguous and ideally concise, too (performance in its million incarnations).
So yeah, I guess you can fix the ambiguous aspect with verbosity. Just write more words until you define everything you need to define more directly when using a formal language.
I would be extremely shocked if programming wouldn't require knowing a very specific, albeit huge, domain jargon.
Question isn't per-se "is English a great language to write the next sorting algorithm in?" . Probably not. Rust is quicker , and cheaper to execute besides. But there's entire classes of problem that English might be more useful for.
English assumes the target is an agent with memory/state in a given context. Ambiguity, verbosity, noise is strongly reduced by means of modelling the other agent's state, then only transmitting the required state diff. The receiver decodes by comparing the diff against the other side's predicted state and updating. [1] This kind of protocol would obviously be NUTS to build from scratch if you went about it as an engineer I'd think. But we have the hardware and software preinstalled in humans , and now my 3090 can run an (imperfect, but viable) decoder
Is it useful? Yeah, I think it actually is. English is able to encode things that are ambiguous, contradictory, vague... and get useful results. Not always; maybe not even often. As you say, skill required, but the option is there. Formal languages just crash.
It's interesting is what I'd call it.
[1] see also: Clark & Brennan's grounding theory in linguistics; Predictive coding in neuroscience; Delta encoding in compression; and Theory of mind in cognitive science. They all dance around the same shape, so this is roughly accurate I think.
In a semi-random sample of 10 recent articles on arxiv.org, 10 articles (100%) contained english language as the predominant part of the corpus. Where necessary mathematical notation was included.
So - you're not wrong that eg. mathematical notation is (often) used, as we both very well know. But English is really quite prominent!
And now computers can process both, where before they couldn't.
The engineering doesn't go away, not yet. Decomposition, abstraction, state management, blast radius containment O:-) . But now you can express much more of that in the language the arxiv papers are already written in.
> But seriously, you can put a shebang on an english text file now (if you're sufficiently brave), or feed it through something that spits out code on the other end (so you can proof read the consequences before executing them).
The funky thing is that it's not just English. I could vibe code in Romanian, it would probably be hilarious :-)) Probably not for whomever would have to take over the app, though.
Everybody seems to want them to be scissors, or at least to treat them as such, but even still the reason everyone can use scissors so well is because they’ve practiced with them, right? You’re probably a lot better at using scissors now than the first time you did it, the functionality is just so simple it’s harder to notice.
To me learning to use LLMs is the same as doing anything else, you have to practice and put in the hours to get good. Maybe some harnesses will eventually allow LLMs to function more as scissors than lathes. This seems to be what Microsoft is trying to do by embedding Copilot in all their products and saying “choose the UI that works best for you”. If that doesn’t end up working we’ll need another paradigm for “non-technical” users to effectively operate computer assistants
Scissors tend to be reasonably straightforward, so there your analogy seems to hold, but upgrading to chopsticks, needles, and chainsaws tends to attract increasing amounts of "you're doing it wrong" in increasingly alarmed tones of voice.
