You can interact with AI and say "code me a calculator" or "now declare a array of booleans to map to each of the keys in the UI and set the corresponding array position to true when the key is pressed".
These commands are written in natural language at such different levels of abstraction that is hard to put them in the same bucket. It would be fair to call the latter an imperative language with the LLM in the role of a compiler. That's very similar to how I use AI.
No, the article explicitly says that the difference is formal vs informal language.
> Programming remained the use of a formal symbolism and, as such, continued to require the care and accuracy required before.
One can define an operational semantics for (at least a subset of) the programming language (even for sloppy one, since they are still very small and restricted). One can prove the semantics preservation theorem formally, or reason somewhat in a similar way informally.
With natural language you kinda lose it, and we don't even touch the fact that models are probabilistic.
And if the latter is guaranteed to be interpreted unambiguously...
...Congratulations!
You have invented a programming language!
But now, that requires 20x more typing and 1,000,000x more compute to compile to machine code.
Which is the point of the article.