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Naur's "Programming as Theory Building" and LLMs replacing human programmers
Go read Peter Naur's "Programming as Theory Building" and then come back and tell me that LLMs can replace human programmers For a copy of Naur’s paper and also my notes about it, see: In this essay, I will perform the logical fallacy of argument from authority (wikipedia.org) to attack the notion that large language model (LLM)-based generative "AI" systems are capable of doing the work of human programmers. LLMs have no "theory" To understand Naur’s paper, you need to understand what he means by "theory", which comes from philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (wikipedia.org).
Instead here’s an analogy by Ryle in the form of a rather long paragraph from The Concept of the Mind (Chapter IX The Intellect), starting on page 263: But the work of making the path was not a process of sauntering easily, but one of marking the ground, digging, fetching loads of gravel, rolling and draining. On the other hand, epistemologists sometimes tell the opposite story, describing what Euclid did in delivering his theories when he had them, as if it was some recrudescence of the original theorising work.
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