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0 pointssethev1mo ago0 comments

Sure, but Joel isn't saying that's impossible or that people who do that are crackpots. In fact, he was an advocate of writing specs ahead of time [1] - for people.

At the time "generating a program from a spec" was an idea floating around that you could come up with a "spec language" that was easier than regular programming languages but somehow still had the same power and could be compiled directly into a program. That's the crackpot idea that Joel is referencing - but that's not what a spec language used with an LLM is doing.

[1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/10/02/painless-functiona...

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jason_oster1mo ago

This is an excellent observation and puts into words something I have barely scratched the surface of. Along with specifications, formal verification is another domain that received the "just automate it" treatment in the before times.

And because formal verification with LLMs is an active area of open research, I have some hope that the old idea of automated formal verification is starting to take shape. There is a lot to talk about here, but I'll leave a link to the 1968 NATO Software Engineering Conference [1] for those who are interested in where these thoughts originated. It goes deeply into the subject of "specification languages" and other related concepts. My understanding is that the historical split between computing science and software engineering has its roots in this 1968 conference.

[1]: http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/brian.randell/NATO/nato1968.PD...

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jason_oster1mo ago

[1]: http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/brian.randell/NATO/nato1968.PD...

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