Do you mean, like, scripting languages? Are the underlying primitives C and machine language? "Might as well be well worded prompts" is the overstatement of the century; any given scripting language is far closer to those underlying layers than it is to using natural language with LLMs.
> A few years ago we didn't have an imprecise nondeterministic programming language that would allow your mom to achieve SOTA results on a wide range of NLP tasks by asking nicely, or I'm sure people would have taken it.
But that (accurate) point makes your point invalid, so you'd rather focus on the dressing.
We still don't have that programming language (although "SOTA" and "wide range of NLP tasks" are vague enough that you can probably move the goalposts into field goal range).