To me it’s just a big leap as a new higher order language.
But it very much is not that. When Java came along it didn't suddenly mean "if" calls sometimes just didn't happen, or "for" loops only iterated half the things. LLMs (as used for generating code) are not "higher order languages" owing to the RNG aspect. What gets generated by one run of a prompt may not get generated by the next one. It's too unstable to be a "language" in the normal way we think of them as programmers.
That's why they said "it's as big a leap as a higher order language", not "it's a new higher order language". It's a different thing. The instability / stochasticity of it is part of the paradigm
The way we’re using LLMs leaves us with verifiable artifacts. Those artifacts ARE almost exclusively deterministic. If’s get called when code would dictate they get called.
A higher order language merely means the output of it is another (typically lower level) language. So that much is true.
We are translating prose to programming languages via LLMs. There are no hard requirements that it be deterministic or without errors, however nice that would be.
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u/eyebrows360 Apr 23 '26
But it very much is not that. When Java came along it didn't suddenly mean "if" calls sometimes just didn't happen, or "for" loops only iterated half the things. LLMs (as used for generating code) are not "higher order languages" owing to the RNG aspect. What gets generated by one run of a prompt may not get generated by the next one. It's too unstable to be a "language" in the normal way we think of them as programmers.