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Imagine Knuth's heartbreak when he sees how LLMs have perverted the practical application of the art of computer programming. ("The LLM understands so I don't have to.") It's sad it happened during his lifetime. Has he commented on the topic? Anyone have a link?

discuss

simonw|7 days ago

https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/chatGPT20.txt is a conversation between Knuth and Wolfram about GPT-4.

> I find it fascinating that novelists galore have written for decades about scenarios that might occur after a "singularity" in which superintelligent machines exist. But as far as I know, not a single novelist has realized that such a singularity would almost surely be preceded by a world in which machines are 0.01% intelligent (say), and in which millions of real people would be able to interact with them freely at essentially no cost.

> I myself shall certainly continue to leave such research to others, and to devote my time to developing concepts that are authentic and trustworthy. And I hope you do the same.

ghssds|7 days ago

> not a single novelist has realized that such a singularity would almost surely be preceded by a world in which machines are 0.01% intelligent (say), and in which millions of real people would be able to interact with them freely at essentially no cost.

Aren't Asimov's Multivac stories basicaly this? Humans build a powerful computer with a conversational interface helping them doing all kind of science and stuff, then before they know they become Multivac's pets.

sethev|7 days ago

I don't know why but it makes me smile that he did this experiment by having a grad student type the questions for chatgpt and copy the results.

rramadass|7 days ago

That link is great!

Knuth has a beautiful way of writing systematically (as can be expected of the inventor of "Literate Programming").

atomic128|7 days ago

That's related. Thank you for posting it.

But what does Knuth think of "vibe coding" or "agentic coding"?

What does he think of "The Dawn of the Dark Ages of Computer Programming"?

johngunderman|7 days ago

While I can't speak for Knuth, I have been reflecting on the fact that developing with a modern LLM seems to be an evolution of the concept of Literate Programming that Knuth has long been a proponent of.

What is the rationale behind the assertion that Knuth would be so fundamentally opposed to the use of LLMs in development?

atomic128|7 days ago

I don't see the connection.

In literate programming you meticulously write code (as usual) but present it to a human reader as an essay: as a web of code chunks connected together in a well-defined manner with plenty of informal comments describing your thinking process and the "story" of the program. You write your program but also structure it for other humans to read and to understand.

LLM software development tends to abandon human understanding. It tends to abandon tight abstractions that manage complexity.

jacquesm|7 days ago

It couldn't be further away from Literate programming. If anything we should call it illiterate programming.

nz|7 days ago

The irony is that if we had been writing literate programs instead of "normal" programs, from 1984 to 2026, then LLMs may actually have been much better at programming in 2026, than they turned out to be. Literate programs entwine the program code with prose-explanations of that code, while also cross-referencing all dependent code of each chunk. In some sense they make fancy IDEs and editors and LSPs unnecessary, because it is all there in the PDF. They also separate the code from the presentation of the code, meaning that you don't really have to worry about the small layout-details of your code. They even have aspects of version control (Knuth advocates keeping old code inside the literate program, and explaining why you thought it would work and why it does not, and what you replaced it with).

LLMs do not bring us closer to literate programming any more than version-control-systems or IDEs or code-comments do. All of these support-technologies exist because the software industry simply couldn't be disciplined enough to learn how to program in the literate style. And it is hard to want to follow this discipline when 95% of the code that you write, is going to be thrown away, or is otherwise built on a shaky foundation.

Another "problem" with literate programming is that it does not scale by number of contributors. It really is designed for a lone programmer who is setting out to solve an interesting yet difficult problem, and who then needs to explain that solution to colleagues, instead of trying to sell it in the marketplace.

And even if literate programming _did_ scale by number of contributors, very few contributors are good at both programming _and_ writing (even the plain academic writing of computer scientists). In fact Bentley told Knuth (in the 80s) that, "2% of people are good at programming, and 2% of people are good at writing -- literate programming requires a person to be good at both" (so only about 0.04% of the adult population would be capable of doing it).

By the way, Knuth said in a book (Coders at Work, I believe): "If I can program it, then I can understand it." The literate paradigm is about understanding. If you do not program it, and if _you_ do not explain the _choices_ that _you_ made during the programming, then you are not understanding it -- you are just making a computer do _something_, that may or may not be the thing that you want (which is fine, most people use computers in this way: but that makes you a user and not a programmer). When LLMs write large amounts of code for you, you are not programming. And when LLMs explain code for you, you are not programming. You are struggling to not drown in a constantly churning code-base that is being modified a dozen times per day by a bunch of people, some of whom you do not know, many of whom are checked out and are trying to get through their day, and all of whom know that it does not matter because they will hop jobs in one or two or three years, and all their bad decisions become someone else's problem.

Just because LLMs can translate one string of tokens into a different string of tokens, while you are programming does not make them "literate". When I read a Knuthian literate program, I see, not a description of what the code does, but a description what it is supposed to do (and why that is interesting), and how a person reasoned his/her way to a solution, blind-alleys and all. The writer of the literate program anticipates the next question, before I even have it, and anticipates what might be confusing, and phrases it in a few ways.

As the creator of the Axiom math software said: the goal of Literate Programming, is to be able to hire an engineer, give him a 500 page book that contains the entire literate program, send him on a 2 week vacation to Hawaii, and have him come back with whole program in his head. If anything LLMs are making this _less_ of a possibility.

In an industry dominated by deadline-obsessed pseudo-programmers creating for a demo-obsessed audience of pseudo-customers, we cannot possibly create software in a high-quality literate style (no, not even with LLMs, even if they got 10x better _and_ 10x cheaper).

Lamport (of Paxos, Byzantine Generals, Bakery Algo, TLA+), made LaTeX and TLA+, with the intent that they be used together, in the same way that CWEB literate programs are. All of these tools (CWEB, TeX, LaTeX, TLA+), are meant to encourage clear and precise thinking at the level of _code_ and the level of _intent_. This is what makes literate programs (and TLA+ specs) conceptually crisp and easily communicable. Just look at the TLA+ spec for OpenRTOS. Their real time OS is a fraction of the size that it would have been if they had implemented it in the industry-standard way, and it has the nice property of being correct.

Literate Programming, by design, is for creating something that _lasts_, and that has value when executed on the machine and in the mind. LLMs (which are being slowly co-opted by the Agile consulting crowd), are (currently) for the exact opposite: they are for creating something that is going to be worthless after the demo.

Razengan|7 days ago

> …LLMs have perverted the practical application of the art of computer programming. ("The LLM understands so I don't have to.") It's sad it happened during his lifetime.

If you see magazines articles or TV shows and ads from the 1980s (a fun rabbit hole on YouTube, like the BBC Archive), the general promise was that "Computers can do anything, if you just program them."

Well, nobody could figure out how to program them. (except the outcasts like us who went on to suffer for the rest of our lives for it :')

OS makers like Microsoft/Apple/etc all had their own ideas about how we should make apps and none of them wanted to work together and still don't.

With phones & "AI" everywhere we are actually closer to that original promise of everyone having a computer and being able to do anything with it, that isn't solely dictated by corporations and their prepackaged apps:

Ideally ChatGPT etc should be able to create interactive apps on the fly on your iPhone etc. Imagine having a specific need and just being able to say it and get a custom app right away just for you on your device.

atomic128|7 days ago

Past progress in software engineering is a tower of well-defined abstractions.

Compilers for languages that make specific guarantees about the semantics of their translation to machine code.

Libraries with well-defined interfaces that let you stand on the shoulders of others by understanding said interfaces and ignoring the internals.

This is how concrete progress is made. You build on solid blocks.

That era is ending.

asddubs|7 days ago