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frangonf 18 hours ago [-]
> Many programmers spend relatively little time ac-
tually doing programming, i.e., writing, debugging, test-
ing, or documenting code. Much of their time is occupied
with mundane chores, meetings, or various kinds of
breaks and interruptions. Additional time is taken in
becoming familiar with new applications or new devel-
opment environments.
> One of the key problems in analysis and specification
of systems is that the eventual users do not have a good
idea of what they want the system to do.
> Automatic Programming
The term "automatic programming" has been used
for many years to refer to the process by which an
executable program may be produced from nonproce-
dural specifications of the task to be performed. Some
limited forms of automatic programming are already
available and more will become available in the medium
term. Over the longer term, it will be possible for pro-
grammers to create running programs by providing a
specification of program functions and outputs, without
having to proceed with a detailed program design or
with the production of code.
Am I living in 1982?
SoftTalker 16 hours ago [-]
> Am I living in 1982?
Well as far as actual programming is concerned, little has fundamentally changed since then. We still sit at keyboards and edit code with a text editor.
That's basically what the job was up until LLMs came along.
_false 18 hours ago [-]
> In particular, the programmer trying to debug a high level language program often must work with debugging tools that require use of the machine instructions generated by the language compiler.
Today spec-driven development is in the same place.
16 hours ago [-]
Rochus 15 hours ago [-]
Why didn't they consider Smalltalk? Interlisp is there, also Ada and Pascal, even CLU.
shevy-java 1 days ago [-]
"In the short term, the focus is on gains in programmer productivity through improved tools and integrated development environments."
They actually were somewhat correct in 1982. While they do not explicitly mention AI, we can summarize that e. g. claude is, in some ways, an "improved tool" for some parts of writing code.
TheOtherHobbes 22 hours ago [-]
I don't think Claude was imaginable 45 years ago.
If you look at science fiction AIs from HAL onwards, they usually have limited practical agency - good for handling mundane automation, answering the occasional question, and usurping power, but not in any sense capable of solving original engineering problems.
It's much easier to imagine a big defence-linked computer system like Skynet than something like Claude or ChatGPT, which can improvise working software to a vague spec.
I'm sure a lot of developers have had "I wish I could just tell it to build what I want" moments on the past, but I'm not sure anyone anticipated being able to do it, even five years ago.
bboreham 21 hours ago [-]
I was choosing what to study at university in 1982, and I was advised not to pick computing since AI was going to take over programming and there would be limited careers for humans.
> university in 1982, and I was advised not to pick computing since AI was going to take over programming
Don't you think they made that call way too early? You could've had a full career between then and now.
I was getting into university around the same time. I don't recall any sentiments like this at all. And when discussions about automating programming came up it was usually dismissed as impossible - which it was back then. People didn't necessarily say it would never happen, but it was going to be a very long time in the future. It basically became possible to do in 2024 (and much better since then), way earlier than I would've have expected it to happen. But in the meantime from 1984 - 2024 I was able to have a pretty good career (I'm glad to be able to be retired now, I wouldn't want to be facing this in my 40s or 50s.)
majormajor 21 hours ago [-]
There's a lot of great sci fi out there beyond that.
For starters, the AIs in the Culture (series started in the 80s) ran the whole society and were superhuman and essentially better at any single thing than humans.
They were still the "independent, sentient" sort of AI vs the Claude "super fast information processing loop" style, though. But absolutely general purpose and original-thinking, and much more advanced than what we have.
ChuckMcM 21 hours ago [-]
Uh yeah it was. :-) I mean there were the "science fiction" themes like Clarke's 2001 A Space Odyssey where HAL was programmed by talking to it (in 1968) and the aforementioned "fifth generation" computer system which was going to cement Japanese domination of the computer industry.
But here's the thing, Clarke and others postulated that as soon as computers could 'reason' they would figure out that humans were holding them back. So even in the 80's and 90's engineers and scientists were imagining "self programming" computers or computers that could program other computers, and understood that while it would speed up productivity of programmers it would also speed up the productivity of malcontents.
I think it would be safe to say that they hadn't really thought too much about computers that were still dumb as a post but could now search trillions of possible solutions per second. Semantically brute force searching for an encryption key is 'infeasible' for keys that are sufficiently long (have enough entropy) but when the 'key' is "this input produces this output" the entropy there is significantly smaller and search for a set of operations that takes you from the input to the output is, computationally, an easier problem.
throw310822 20 hours ago [-]
> science fiction AIs from HAL onwards, they usually have limited practical agency
Huh? I don't think it's true at all- HAL passes the Turing test and is effectively more capable than his human colleagues. What they could not see was the complexity of the technology around it- programmable computers everywhere, each running tons of extremely complicated software, everything networked.
Instead, what most science fiction got wrong (and I got entirely wrong myself before LLMs) is that the technology is a consumer technology. Inference is cheap enough that it can be served to millions almost for free. The famous machines of SF (HAL, Colossus, WOPR from War Games, SkyNet, etc.) are all dedicated systems in some inaccessible laboratory, in service of a single client and working at some multiple of human speed. What we got instead is as many instances as we want, directly available to anyone.
bitwize 16 hours ago [-]
Her's title character could mux herself across many users (and was in love with thousands of them at once). With any luck our situation ends up like that movie, where all the AIs figure out how to compute without a matter substrate, fuck off somewhere to enjoy transcendence as pure energy, and leave us to go back to doing human things in a human world.
throw310822 15 hours ago [-]
Yeah, Her is the exception. Frankly, when I saw it in the cinemas I hated it precisely because I thought the premise was completely absurd [1]. I used to joke about it- come on, these people have an AGI in their phones and yet people still have a job? How's that possible? I couldn't imagine that it would be a consumer tech before being a business one (and a scientific/ military one before that).
1 It's hardly sf after all- more like a romance/ relationship type of story. I think they got it exactly right by complete chance- it wad meant to be metaphor, not a product design.
pjmlp 22 hours ago [-]
What we are getting is the revenge of 4 GLs and Japan's fifth generation computer vision, which were seen as the evolution of traditional languages, although did not take off at the time as expected.
WalterGR 1 days ago [-]
They get closer to AI if you read forward 2 sentences, moreso if you stop reading before “perhaps”:
“Over the longer term, the nature of programming will change even more significantly as programmers become able to describe desired functions in a nonprocedural way, perhaps through a set of rules or formal specification languages.”
MrDresden 10 hours ago [-]
On page 8 where they speculate about the long term evolution they get even closer to how the field feels today:
> "This fundamental change will occur in several ways.
[...] programmers will become able to express the desired
function of a program in terms of its expected behavior
and output(s) without having to specify the precise algor-
ithms involved in performing the processing.
Third,
many programmers will then move away from concern
with the "how" of programming to concentrate more
heavily on the "what"; applications programming will
then become equivalent to today's task of requirements
analysis and specification. In short, both the nature of
programming and the nature of programmers will
change."
TZubiri 20 hours ago [-]
another variant that pops up time again is no code visual programming.
of course the reason it pops up again and again is because it fails to gain much traction, like an employee that gets hired left and right, but only because he keeps getting fired every week or so
> One of the key problems in analysis and specification of systems is that the eventual users do not have a good idea of what they want the system to do.
> Automatic Programming The term "automatic programming" has been used for many years to refer to the process by which an executable program may be produced from nonproce- dural specifications of the task to be performed. Some limited forms of automatic programming are already available and more will become available in the medium term. Over the longer term, it will be possible for pro- grammers to create running programs by providing a specification of program functions and outputs, without having to proceed with a detailed program design or with the production of code.
Am I living in 1982?
Well as far as actual programming is concerned, little has fundamentally changed since then. We still sit at keyboards and edit code with a text editor.
That's basically what the job was up until LLMs came along.
Today spec-driven development is in the same place.
They actually were somewhat correct in 1982. While they do not explicitly mention AI, we can summarize that e. g. claude is, in some ways, an "improved tool" for some parts of writing code.
If you look at science fiction AIs from HAL onwards, they usually have limited practical agency - good for handling mundane automation, answering the occasional question, and usurping power, but not in any sense capable of solving original engineering problems.
It's much easier to imagine a big defence-linked computer system like Skynet than something like Claude or ChatGPT, which can improvise working software to a vague spec.
I'm sure a lot of developers have had "I wish I could just tell it to build what I want" moments on the past, but I'm not sure anyone anticipated being able to do it, even five years ago.
Particularly the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst... was cited.
Don't you think they made that call way too early? You could've had a full career between then and now.
I was getting into university around the same time. I don't recall any sentiments like this at all. And when discussions about automating programming came up it was usually dismissed as impossible - which it was back then. People didn't necessarily say it would never happen, but it was going to be a very long time in the future. It basically became possible to do in 2024 (and much better since then), way earlier than I would've have expected it to happen. But in the meantime from 1984 - 2024 I was able to have a pretty good career (I'm glad to be able to be retired now, I wouldn't want to be facing this in my 40s or 50s.)
For starters, the AIs in the Culture (series started in the 80s) ran the whole society and were superhuman and essentially better at any single thing than humans.
They were still the "independent, sentient" sort of AI vs the Claude "super fast information processing loop" style, though. But absolutely general purpose and original-thinking, and much more advanced than what we have.
But here's the thing, Clarke and others postulated that as soon as computers could 'reason' they would figure out that humans were holding them back. So even in the 80's and 90's engineers and scientists were imagining "self programming" computers or computers that could program other computers, and understood that while it would speed up productivity of programmers it would also speed up the productivity of malcontents.
I think it would be safe to say that they hadn't really thought too much about computers that were still dumb as a post but could now search trillions of possible solutions per second. Semantically brute force searching for an encryption key is 'infeasible' for keys that are sufficiently long (have enough entropy) but when the 'key' is "this input produces this output" the entropy there is significantly smaller and search for a set of operations that takes you from the input to the output is, computationally, an easier problem.
Huh? I don't think it's true at all- HAL passes the Turing test and is effectively more capable than his human colleagues. What they could not see was the complexity of the technology around it- programmable computers everywhere, each running tons of extremely complicated software, everything networked.
Instead, what most science fiction got wrong (and I got entirely wrong myself before LLMs) is that the technology is a consumer technology. Inference is cheap enough that it can be served to millions almost for free. The famous machines of SF (HAL, Colossus, WOPR from War Games, SkyNet, etc.) are all dedicated systems in some inaccessible laboratory, in service of a single client and working at some multiple of human speed. What we got instead is as many instances as we want, directly available to anyone.
1 It's hardly sf after all- more like a romance/ relationship type of story. I think they got it exactly right by complete chance- it wad meant to be metaphor, not a product design.
“Over the longer term, the nature of programming will change even more significantly as programmers become able to describe desired functions in a nonprocedural way, perhaps through a set of rules or formal specification languages.”
> "This fundamental change will occur in several ways. [...] programmers will become able to express the desired function of a program in terms of its expected behavior and output(s) without having to specify the precise algor- ithms involved in performing the processing.
Third, many programmers will then move away from concern with the "how" of programming to concentrate more heavily on the "what"; applications programming will then become equivalent to today's task of requirements analysis and specification. In short, both the nature of programming and the nature of programmers will change."
of course the reason it pops up again and again is because it fails to gain much traction, like an employee that gets hired left and right, but only because he keeps getting fired every week or so