BEBeefWellington·Mar 25, 2022
> OK, I am waiting for you to propose a basic language parser that can do it. There's a reason we're only now having this debate - it was unconceivable 5 years ago, in the era of basic language parsers.
This is really untrue. In fact, making "English as a programming language" was a goal of many older programming languages such as COBOL[1], BASIC, and PASCAL as early as the 60s. It's hardly a new idea and was hardly inconceivable "5 years ago" for something to output a programming language.
The sentence example here could easily be broken down by the ParseTalk model from the mid-90s[2].
Here's a recent ish example (2018) of someone developing a "fully English" programming language:
https://osmosianplainenglishprogramming.blog/2018/05/02/plai...
It's also a source of fun[3][4][5] for people.
These are all examples of either programming lan
Read the rest
guages straight up using English as syntax, or lexical parsers that can break down language and provide you with the programmatic ability to make this kind of output.
The difference here is that while copilot is pulling in python examples based on its training data set, that one thing the author singled out for amazement could easily be done by these older non-ML methods. The value copilot is adding in the example is just outputting python compared to those other methods. The real value is way larger than that, pulling in potentially more complex code to accomplish a complete task.
It's a bit like seeing an all-electric cargo train and being amazed that a train can run on electricity, when electrified light rail has existed for a long time. The impressive part is not that a thing on rails can use electricity to move around, it's the fact that it can pull heavy cargo efficiently enough to make electric power viable.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#COBOL_60
[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/cmp-lg/9410017
[3]: https://github.com/RockstarLang/rockstar/blob/main/examples/...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_Programming_Langua...
[5]: https://github.com/lhartikk/ArnoldC/wiki/ArnoldC