Given that it's trained on human code, your "a control variable which then isn't even used" probably needs an "anymore" added. I don't know about others, but that's a sin i committed many, many, many times: You try all kinds of stuff to get code working the way you want it right now(*), including adding all sorts of counters to support debug output. When the stuff finally works, you remove the prints, and then close the file as fast as possible. Leaving all the unused and dead code alone, because you don't want to break it again by accident.

(*) Friday evening. All coworkers have already gone home for the weekend. You are desperate to finish the current task any way possible so you can leave, too. There's always time to do a cleanup of the code next week, right?

I don't think it learned to mimic "sins".

It's just averaging a collage of different real life sources it found.

From my understanding it'll fail with tasks without prior boilerplate available in the web.

And ChatGPT shouldn't be capable to port a piece of foreign code to Perl.

(But this could be a task machine learning might achieve, because it's testable and trainable)

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the 𐍀𐌴𐍂𐌻 Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery}

And ChatGPT shouldn't be capable to port a piece of foreign code to Perl.

edit: fixed a few typos and added a couple of missing words that apparently formed in my head but my hands never got the message to actually type them in.

I can't test right now with a "pure" example because ChatGPT is overloaded.

Last week i got it to write me a simple license generator in Perl, then output the same thing in JavaScript and Python. I haven't run any of that code, i was only interested to see if it would use similar algorithms and variable names. I don't know my way around python, but the Perl code was nearly up to my style guide. And the Javascript code looked very much as if i had hand-ported that from Perl myself.

Since ChatGPT basically generates new text based on text already given to it in the conversation, it could do a good job at attempting to port foreign code to Perl. I doubt it would get it perfectly right, but even if all it did was to change the way constructs and variables are written (prefix-stuff, foreach loops and such), that could still potentially make the job go a lot quicker.

I do a lot of hand-porting between JavaScript and Perl and C(++). That's why you sometimes see me use C-style for loops when there's no need for it. It's just easier to port. Any (future) modern, automatic help that comes my way will be very appreciated.

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