Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Software that writes software is quite helpful. Well, maybe sort of not.

MIT jumps into the fray and asks a few dozen programmers if AI that writes software is helpful to people who write software. First, the folks at MIT are smart enough to not base a survey piece on a survey of a few dozen people. The sample size, as is often repeated, is not big enough.

Anyways, is software that writes software helpful? It certainly is helpful to those folks who don’t like the folks who write software as a profession. Those programmers are difficult to talk to and get along with and all that stuff. The machine is much easier to disdain.

But how about those folks who write programs professionally. Do they like the machine helping them? Of course they do. Good grief. If there wasn’t a machine, they wouldn’t have any machine to program. And compilers, software that writes software, are the greatest invention since 1s and 0s. And editors, like vi and emacs and such, are great software that writes software. The “modern” systems have auto-complete so you don’t have to remember all the names of all the functions and variables that you have to use. These new IDEs predict the next character or ten for the programmer.

And speaking of predicting, these chatbots predict the next character over and over and over until you have 100 lines of code predicted. Programmers understand the loop concept. Do one good thing. Loop over that N times. What’s the difference between predicting one character and predicting N characters? Nothing.

So all this software writing software is great stuff. You just have to specify what you want correctly.

Wait a minute. Specify what you want correctly. That is what computer programmers have always done. Instruct the machine to do something. Do this in assembly language or Java. Well, maybe now we do it in … what do you call that specification language we use with these chattering bots? Oh, English. Well, its sort of English.

Wait a minute. Are these chattering bots are nothing but new compilers? No one told me about that.

Back to the drawing board (does anyone use a drawing board any longer?). We can do better.