Idle thought: In the 1990s I wrote a lot of Perl. Then I switched to Python and found I enjoyed writing that a lot more, and this persisted in that I also tried Ruby and didn't like it.

One of the things I'd come to realise is that while the idea of a language like Perl or Ruby that tried to be "expressive" or, to a certain extent, closer to natural language than other programming languages were/are sounds nice and narrows the gap between thinking something and expressing it as code, it allows the ambiguities of natural language to creep in to code where ambiguity is Really Bad.

Relatedly I've never liked natural language interfaces to things. I find it adds an awkward translation layer between the goal I have in my head and the achieving of it. Explaining things to other humans directly is fine, since I understand the need to communicate for a group to achieve an end, but I know the computer is just going to turn it into something else and so, again, the ambiguities show up, and so I'm now worrying about the way to phrase what I want to something where ideally I can implement my goal much more directly without having to get English involved.

So yeah, part of what puts me off using LLM tools is I do _not_ want to talk to them. I don't want to spend the effort turning my thoughts into prose for them. I'm not _in_ natural language mode at that point, and I don't want to be. So are there ways to use these things that don't require that mode of interaction?