Leslie Lamport on programming languages/ machine learning

[StefanHoutzager]

Today, programming is generally equated with coding. It’s hard to convince students who want to write code that they should learn to think mathematically, above the code level, about what they’re doing. Perhaps the following observation will give them pause. It’s quite likely that during their lifetime, machine learning will completely change the nature of programming. The programming languages they are now using will seem as quaint as Cobol, and the coding skills they are learning will be of little use. But mathematics will remain the queen of science, and the ability to think mathematically will always be useful.

Bulletin of EATCS

[IRLeif]

This is very interesting. Stephen Wolfram advocates for similar ideas. Just last week, I heard him talk about that in a recent episode (“Stephen Wolfram: Knowledge Engine”) of Lex Fridman’s Artificial Intelligence Podcast. At a point during the Q&A, he talks about the “everyone should learn how to code”-fad vs. teaching people how to think and reason about problems, etc.