I think this essay has aged pretty well and remains pretty spot on.
Some people will push back that agent development is "natural language programming" but I don't think that's right. I think in that case the agent is the one programming, and the programming still always happens in a deterministic language like Rust/Python/Typescript/etc. Maybe that'll change, but to me at least the other way would be a disaster.
The best exception I know of though, is definitely the Inform 7 language which is for writing text adventures[0]. It has a lot of fans, and I've never gone deep with it, but seems to do a pretty elegant job or marrying up natural language and programming together in a unique way.
Either way, definitely a must-check-out for any language-geeks interested in natural language programming.
On a related note: I’d say that in 90% of all use-cases talking to LLMs to create code is the right approach.
As opposed to creating flows where LLMs do something on the fly.
Code creates determinism, LLMs don’t.
I’ve heard plenty of “tech enthusiasts” breezily talk about how close we are to natural language getting compiled down to machine code but has anyone credible got any idea if that’s even a path? Closest think I can think of is DSL type setups like a much richer version of the stuff Haskell people get excited about but that’s not close to an actual natural language "language"
Of course it's a path. Claude does that already.
Existence proof: everything Claude Code does, including talking to LLMs on GPUs via the Anthropic API, and shelling out to other tools installed on your system, could in principle be compiled into one big self-contained binary (or Turing Machine if you prefer) that is able to take natural language in and produce compiled binaries out.
If you wanted to go a bit harder you could train Claude to output machine code directly, but that's not necessary. Whether the machine code comes straight out of an LLM or out of a compiler that is fed source code that comes from an LLM is a mere implementation detail, there's not any fundamental difference.