I remember some years back that programmers would consider the syntax and the semantics the same, and consider this discussion purely academic. Now NLP/LLMs mean nontrivial work can be done without formal syntax and suddenly the debate has flipped. We’ve always had errors and inflexibility in the syntax is semantics approach but they call them bugs and i implemented features. The possibility now is flipping that and being able to describe semantics without syntax errors, change or extend semantics without a 3 year, 1 year, or even 1 week release cycle. There are many other benefits too.
I remember some years back that programmers would consider the syntax and the semantics the same, and consider this discussion purely academic. Now NLP/LLMs mean nontrivial work can be done without formal syntax and suddenly the debate has flipped. We’ve always had errors and inflexibility in the syntax is semantics approach but they call them bugs and i implemented features. The possibility now is flipping that and being able to describe semantics without syntax errors, change or extend semantics without a 3 year, 1 year, or even 1 week release cycle. There are many other benefits too.