We still need to learn to code

If I go to burger joint somewhere outside the UK, I’ll usually look at the price and mentally convert it into GBP. I guess I could use a calculator, but it seems slightly pointless. Traders use Excel all the time, but it doesn’t negate the need to be numerate. Would a bank want to employ a trader who had awful mental arithmetic? We have machine to do calculations for us, but we still need to have a way of understanding their output and reasoning whether it is right or wrong?

Justin Huang, CEO of Nvidia, was quoted recently, as saying we should stop telling kids that they need to code (see video here). The rationale is that LLMs will enable us to code using human language. I suppose to some extent you could call this talking his book. After all, Nvidia stock price has exploded in tandem with all the interest in LLMs and the way they need a lot of compute (preferably from Nvidia’s GPUs). To a certain extent, Huang has a point, but I think it’s not the whole story. Human language is by its nature imprecise compared with programming languages, and it’s a point my good friend Paul Bilokon, Rebellion Research's Quant of the Year 2023 has made, as have many others. I think Grady Booch, one of the best known software engineers, said it best on his Twitter account recently in this tweet below, where he referenced Huang's video:

AI will kill coding in the same way that compilers killed coding.

What kind of human language prompts would have sufficient detail, clarity, and precision to permit the creation of useful, evolvable, and maintainable executable assets?

We call those "programming languages".

I guess I can understand why Huang made the point point...

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