But an actually good one.
What is Blogvent? (tl;dr I am going to write one post a day for all of December as a way to practice writing.)
You’ll need to excuse another ChatGPT post but it’s been the only thing occupying my mind today.
Experiments
I’ve been doing more and more tests with ChatGPT and programming and there’s one angle that I haven’t seen discussed much. When it comes to teaching someone programming or when someone is relatively new to programming. Online resources and communities are very dominated by English, which I think is a shame.
Telling someone “learn English or get out” isn’t a very productive venture (or nice). Sure the languages themselves have keywords in English but I’ve seen from non native English speakers that it’s more about associating functionality with text. volatile in C++ isn’t going to violently erupt, it has a language based meaning behind it.
Rust
A short while ago, there was a very heated thread on Twitter regarding Rust and their plan to translate error messages to different languages (with error codes, don’t worry). This sparked that “learn English or get out” discussion again, sadly.
Their reasoning is correct, someone is programming, their English might be bad or it might be so so, and getting an error message in their native language can help, a lot.
ChatGPT
So yesterday I saw that ChatGPT could respond to you in different languages (with different levels of quality). It even did Icelandic and regardless of the errors (which were minor) it was pretty good.
Then this got me thinking.
Imagine you have some sort of text editor, like VSCode, and you could highlight a bit of code and ask a tool like ChatGPT to explain this to you, and it would give you back a text description of those lines of code, in your native language. It could even give you suggestions on improvements, like I talked about in my recent post.
Clippy 2.0, maybe.