ChatGPT and the like will co-pilot coders to new heights of creativity John Naughton

When digital computers were invented, the first task was to instruct them to do what we wanted. The problem was that the machines didn't understand English – they only knew ones and zeros. You could program them with long sequences of these two digits and if you got the sequence right then the machines would do what you wanted. But life's too short for composing infinite strings of ones and zeros, so we began designing programming languages that allowed us to express our wishes in a human-readable form that could then be translated (by a piece of software called a "compiler") into terms that machines could understand and obey. Over the next 60 years or so, these programming languages – with names such as Fortran, Basic, Algol, COBOL, PL/1, LISP, C, C, Python – proliferated like rabbits, so that there are now many hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of them.