My feeling is that AI is not real coding; it is coding-adjacent. Project Management, Sales, Marketing, Writing Books About KanBan, AI Programming, User Interface Design, Installing Routers are coding-adjacent. AI is not real coding any more than The Sims is homemaking. You can use AI and hang with the tech guys and get your check but you are going to be treading water and trying to be liked personally to stay where you are. No question it's a job, but no, it's not coding.
My thinking is that high level languages like C aren't real coding. If you don't even know what ISA the software will be run on, then you need to get the fuck off my lawn!
Yes, "An LLM is just a new higher level programming language", sure. A new programming language with no tractable guarantees about the behavior of any particular program, including in practice no guarantees that the same source code (in this new programming language) will reliably produce the same behavior. This is very different from traditional programming languages and how we can reason about them.
(Yes, one can write C programs with undefined behavior, but C does also have many well-defined properties which allow people to reason about well-defined C programs logically reliably.)
It used to be that old farts made a big deal out of knowing the ins and outs of assembly programming and sneered at the kids who only knew "high level" languages like C, why, those damn kids didn't even understand the machine code their compilers emitted, didn't even know or care that it was so obviously suboptimal.
Really, your attitude is not new. Including even your "this is why it's different this time", its just a mirror reflecting the past.
I can't speak personally to what it was like to be a C developer in the early days of that language, but when I started out as a Ruby on Rails developer over a decade ago I was definitely told by some people that it didn't count as 'real programing' because of how much was abstracted away by the framework.
Mocking? I'm quoting exactly the sort of thing that used to be said in earnest in the 80s and 90s. What you're doing now is exactly the same thing, there's no difference at all. Its the same reaction borne from the same old man instinct to bitch about the kids going soft. Yawn.
Both Algol and Lisp were from the 60s. I think programmers and computers scientists were already acquainted with high level programming languages enough to not equate using C as going soft.
Also software was always about domain knowledge and formal reasoning. Coding is just notation. Someone may like paper and pen, and someone may like a typewriter, but ultimately it’s the writing that matters. Correctness of a program does not depends on the language (and the cpu only manipulate electric flow).
I argue against AI because most of its users don’t care about the correctness of their code. They just want to produce lots of it (the resurgence of the flawed LoC metric as a badge of honor).
> Both Algol and Lisp were from the 60s. I think programmers and computers scientists were already acquainted with high level programming languages enough to not equate using C as going soft
Most programmers didn't have access to anything so fancy as those, in fact most programmers considered access to a C compiler to be an extravagant flex well into the 80s. By the 90s they were well available and you had a new generation of programmers that started out with C, encountering older programmers who started out writing assembly for their z80s, the latter of whole were constantly sneering at kids going soft.
Starting when I was about 10, I learned BASIC (not a real language, I was constantly told), z80, then C (a "high level" language) for the m68k. I encountered all of the attitudes I know see ITT being thrown at programmers using coding agents. Hell, I would bet money on some of those exact same old farts still lurking IRC channels, occasionally waking up like
Rip Van Winkle to grumble about kids taking old ubiquitous technology for granted now.
Right? Some of us used to read hex digits off printed paper dumps to debug mainframe memory (like me), but we can be excited about AI and embrace it, too.
From my perspective, knowing how it gets down to machine code makes it more useful and easier to control, but that doesn't mean I want to stop writing English now that we can.
Sorry to see you're getting mocked. I hate both the (current) low quality and the exploitation aspects of AI more than anyone. However, I don't understand your post. What is real coding according to you?
Republicans simply don’t use words the same way others do. If you say you like flowers in the garden you mean they should be there. If they say they like flowers in the garden, they mean they would like to be paid to control whether they are there.
We’re not that deep. One is bad enough. Biden was not senile or a pedophile. That was an obvious attempt to rub smear off of Trump. We do comprehend the existence of propaganda, it’s just that we can’t do anything about it anymore than you can.
You can either use the stack in an intuitive way, or you can change the tree directly in a somewhat less intuitive way without recursion. Essentially either DF or BF. I don’t see how it matters much anymore with stacks that grow automatically, but it’s good to understand.
I long ago used arq backup with google drive as a target, and there’s something like 1-10 million little chunk files in that directory so it’s probably that…
Most people who use Google services don't know about this or simply do not have bare minimum technical knowledge required to set this up or even know why they would need to do backups
It doesn't require any technical expertise to set up--you click a button--unless you want to import into something else. I agree it should be more advertised, but I don't see how an open source tool would require less technical knowledge or be better known.
I’m impressed the author was able to learn and handle all the UI while blind. The corner of “just works” computing they live in could be beyond what I’ve ever experienced.
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