Last I was fascinated by Simon Willison's article A Datasette tutorial written by GPT-3. Datasette is a project I've been following for a while now. It's tool for exploring data stored in SQLite databases. GPT-3 was new to me, but it seems it's an AI for writing articles from simple text prompts. I had a quick look at the web page for it, but couldn't find any obvious way to actually try it out, so I filed it away to investigate further at some point in the future.
But today, I saw another article by Simon called How to play with the GPT-3 language model which gave basic instructions on getting going on the system. And within a couple of minutes I was ready to go.
I seeded the text input with the phrase "Write an article about why Perl is popular" and pressed the submit button. Here's the text I got back:
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular among programmers. Perl is often used for system administration, web development, network programming, and GUI development.
Perl's popularity can be attributed to its many features, which make it both powerful and easy to use. Perl's syntax is very concise and easy to read, making it a great choice for beginners. Perl also has excellent support for text processing, which is one of its most commonly used applications. Additionally, Perl's extensive library of modules makes it easy to add new functionality to Perl programs.
Perl is also very portable, meaning it can run on a wide variety of platforms. Perl is available for many operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS. This portability makes it a great choice for developing cross-platform applications.
Overall, Perl's popularity is due to its many features that make it a powerful and easy-to-use programming language. Perl's text processing capabilities, portability, and large module library make it a great choice
And that looks pretty good to me. It simply and effectively ticks all the boxes on my "why I use Perl" list.
Of course, I'm not seriously suggesting that we use AI to write a marketing campaign for Perl. But I do think it's an easy way to get a start on promotional material that you can then clean up yourself.
What do you think? Can you think of a way to use this software?
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