It makes me think of the promises and perils of Jupyter notebooks.
So far as this article is concerned (not the many commenters who are talking past it), "chat" is like interacting with a shell or a REPL. How different is the discussion that Winograd has with SHRDLU
with the conversation that you have with a database with the SQL monitor really?
There's a lot to say for trying to turn that kind of conversation into a more durable artifact. I'd argue that writing unit tests in Java I'm doing exploratory work like I'd do in a Python REPL except my results aren't scrolling away but are built into something I can check into version control.
On the other hand, workspace-oriented programming environments are notorious for turning into a sloppy mess, for instance people really can't make up their mind if they want to store the results of their computations (God help you if you have more than one person working on it, never mind if you want to use version control -- yet, isn't that a nice way to publish a data analysis?) or if they want to be a program that multiple people can work, can produce reproducible results, etc.
See also the struggles of "Literate Programming"
Not to say there isn't an answer to all this but boy is it a fraught area.
So far as this article is concerned (not the many commenters who are talking past it), "chat" is like interacting with a shell or a REPL. How different is the discussion that Winograd has with SHRDLU
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU
with the conversation that you have with a database with the SQL monitor really?
There's a lot to say for trying to turn that kind of conversation into a more durable artifact. I'd argue that writing unit tests in Java I'm doing exploratory work like I'd do in a Python REPL except my results aren't scrolling away but are built into something I can check into version control.
On the other hand, workspace-oriented programming environments are notorious for turning into a sloppy mess, for instance people really can't make up their mind if they want to store the results of their computations (God help you if you have more than one person working on it, never mind if you want to use version control -- yet, isn't that a nice way to publish a data analysis?) or if they want to be a program that multiple people can work, can produce reproducible results, etc.
See also the struggles of "Literate Programming"
Not to say there isn't an answer to all this but boy is it a fraught area.