5 ms·

The renewed interest in C++ and other compiled languages is an indication of the need to get more efficient. Programmer skill will become more important in the

The renewed interest in C++ and other compiled languages is an indication of the need to get more efficient. Programmer skill will become more important in the future. But they won't be today's skills. I expect that programming in the future will be more about getting the AI to do what you want rather than writing code directly.

Forge36 7y ago
Using the data we what have would already be a big gain. I think that's AI's biggest contribution. I've seen a lot of time and complexity go into improving functionality beat by someone who wrote code to track what actions were taken, and adjust based on frequency of use. The first option is needed if you have no data and cannot gather the data, the second is great because it can adjust itself over time. This is where I see the SRE (site reliability engineers) role. The developers making changes are put into a position where they measure the cost impact of a decision. It's these feedback loops, and the practices they instill, that I believe we need. New programmers can help break the mold, but without good feedback they'll fall into the same traps.
thechao 7y ago
I’m already an AI you can pay to get a computer to do what you “want”; the problem is ‘what you want’ is so poorly specified, there’s no way to turn it into an actionable set of steps!
- meztez 7y ago
  This comment has to be the most insightful I have ever read. It is true on so many levels and captures perfectly the mentality that some senior decision makers have about AI.
- archi42 7y ago
  Other dev: "I wish I could just tell an AI to do $implementation for me", me: "You know what our boss just did?". ;-)
papermachete 7y ago
Agreed. Hopefuly a fusion between prolog and haskell comes by - a modern declarative language to end all languages. Let it decide what's best for cache locality and profile your performance. Let it choose the best data structures based on your constraints - compile time and maybe runtime.
- WhyNott 7y ago
  FYI, a fusion between prolog and haskell already exists: its called mercury. Its a statically compiled language with decent performance characteristics (at least, in its category).
  - tluyben2 7y ago
    Mercury was pretty good last I tried and a very interesting language at that; I like Prolog and did quite a lot of work in it in the 90s (mostly research). I like how clean it looks (that's from Prolog) and the performance is great due to the fact that you give quite a lot of info to the compiler when you are programming (see for instance [0]). It has many backends it compiles to (Java, .NET, Erlang, native; not sure how well they are all maintained). It is a shame that not more people are working on the language and that not more people use it; I think there was not enough hype surrounding it. I gave up as it could not produce native code for ARM, a platform I always need for everything I do (for many years already), so to take a language seriously as something to dive in, it needs to have ARM support. Not sure what the state of that is now; this is many years ago. [0] https://www.mercurylang.org/information/doc-latest/mercury_ref/Determinism-categories.html https://www.mercurylang.org/information/doc-latest/mercury_r...
    - pdimitar 7y ago
      As a general comment and talking about myself exclusively, it's a new kind of fatigue that I would call "oh look, another programming language". There are quite a few very interesting and solid languages out there. One example for something that's not nearly well enough utilised or used widely is OCaml -- although in its case the lack of true multicore CPU support definitely cripples interest. But the language has an amazing type system that catches a _TON_ of errors (maybe even more than Rust's compiler, not entirely sure). And its compiler is just lightning-fast, fastest I've ever seen in fact. And it is multi-paradigm language (OOP and functional, and a lot of interesting typing constructs on top, half of which I don't even understand). Etc. Not advocating for OCaml by the way (I work with Elixir and am looking to get better at Rust lately). It's just an example demonstrating that, again, there are a good amount of very solid languages and runtimes out there but we the programmers are so busy either (a) belonging to tribes or (b) being so damn busy we can't look beyond the tech we do our daily job with -- and then a lot of excellent tech gets left in the dust. :( Mercury might be one of these tech pieces. And it's definitely not the only one.
crazypython 7y ago
It seems to me that if we can merge https://github.com/Syniurge/Calypso https://github.com/Syniurge/Calypso into LDC, we can get a language that is easier to understand and compiles faster than C++, Dlang.
falcolas 7y ago
Identifying the right characteristics in data, and creating properly tagged corpuses of data that correspond with the right characteristics is no less work than writing code. Not to mention manually written algorithms are, in many cases, more accurate than ML heuristics (for a terrible yet relevant example in the finance industry, identifying the correct sum of a set of numbers).
sly010 7y ago
Why not both?
jobseeker990 7y ago
What about Rust or D? OR even Go-lang?
quotemstr 7y ago
I don't think the new interest in compiled language reflects anything other than ongoing cyclical changes in fashion. Neither "compiled" nor "interpreted" language families (the terms are vague and the same language can fall in both categories) has a slam dunk performance advantage over the other. > I expect that programming in the future will be more about getting the AI to do what you want rather than writing code directly. This is the clear endgame. The question is how long it takes to get there.
- throwaway17_17 7y ago
  It’s a small semantic nitpick, but I think that you have to qualify the domain of conversation in stating: ‘neither “compiled” or “interpreted” language families ... has a slam dunk performance advantage over the other.’ If this is universally qualified, where are the scientific HPC simulations written in python, AAA video games written in Haskell, and fin tech trading apps written in Lisp? I am not stating that there are no places where compiled vs interpreted can never produce acceptable results, it’s just more nuanced than a forall type proposition. Addendum: I am aware C# could sort of be ‘interpreted’ and Unity is C#, so there is at least some evidence in the game category, but I’d quibble over the best-in-class C#/Unity game being considered 100% C#.
  - sudosysgen 7y ago
    Unity is also quite far from being known for the best performance.
cmdshiftf4 7y ago
>The renewed interest in C++ and other compiled languages is an indication of the need to get more efficient. I kind of disagree with this based on intuition alone. Most developers, professional developers, are using web tech (JS stack in particular - Node and hyped front-end frameworks). Yet we"re seeing "interest" in compiled languages such as Rust, despite almost nobody using it professionally and almost nobody doing much with it outside of simple proof of concepts. To me it points toward a developing sense of insecurity in modern professional developers that simply being a JS dev isn't really programming/development and they've to "prove" themselves with lower level tech. Something that indicates that, for me, is in StackOverflow's 2019 survey [0] the most used tech was JS and that which surrounds it, followed by Python and other easy-to-get-going-well-supported tech. Yet the "Most Loved" was Rust. I could be wrong, and I'm open to being, but I intuitively I don't believe the interest in performant technologies is in the face of the sheer bloat we've seen, particularly from the web-front. >Programmer skill will become more important in the future. My prediction on this, not so AI specific, is that developing and deploying web-tech will continue to become easier and easier, meaning it'll take less people to do it. Sure, work may arise from developing countries/economies to supplant a drop in demand for it in the developed world, but maybe not. Combined with a potential bubble burst in tech, I think those relying on web dev for a living could be in trouble in the coming decade. I don't foresee much in terms of companies trying to optimize operational costs by instructing their devs to write their code more efficiently with memory/performance in mind to reduce operating costs, and thus spur a push toward jumping on compiled languages. If anything, cloud computing will continue to get cheaper and cheaper as the big 3 continue to try and absorb as much marketshare as possible. [0] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#overview https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#overview
- steveklabnik 7y ago
  Rust is used for far more than proofs of concept, and is deployed at some of the largest tech companies in some of their key products.
  - cmdshiftf4 7y ago
    Not disagreeing with that. Although, in re-reading the above, I have made a grave mistake above, contrasting most used with most loved. SO's "most loved" is measured by "of those professional using this language, how many responded that they love using it", so in the case of Rust it's 83.5% of the 3% using it professionally. In retrospect I think my point would be better made by pointing at the difference between the technologies being used professionally and the technologies "most wanted", where Go and Rust are in the top 20% of wanted but the bottom 40% for Go and bottom 20% for Rust. I'll leave the original intact for posterity but what's cited is done so erroneously.
c-cube 7y ago
I'm hopeful about Crystal filling this niche in the future.

Forge36 7y ago

Using the data we what have would already be a big gain. I think that's AI's biggest contribution. I've seen a lot of time and complexity go into improving functionality beat by someone who wrote code to track what actions were taken, and adjust based on frequency of use. The first option is needed if you have no data and cannot gather the data, the second is great because it can adjust itself over time. This is where I see the SRE (site reliability engineers) role. The developers making changes are put into a position where they measure the cost impact of a decision. It's these feedback loops, and the practices they instill, that I believe we need. New programmers can help break the mold, but without good feedback they'll fall into the same traps.

thechao 7y ago

I’m already an AI you can pay to get a computer to do what you “want”; the problem is ‘what you want’ is so poorly specified, there’s no way to turn it into an actionable set of steps!

meztez 7y ago
This comment has to be the most insightful I have ever read. It is true on so many levels and captures perfectly the mentality that some senior decision makers have about AI.
archi42 7y ago
Other dev: "I wish I could just tell an AI to do $implementation for me", me: "You know what our boss just did?". ;-)

papermachete 7y ago

Agreed. Hopefuly a fusion between prolog and haskell comes by - a modern declarative language to end all languages. Let it decide what's best for cache locality and profile your performance. Let it choose the best data structures based on your constraints - compile time and maybe runtime.

WhyNott 7y ago
FYI, a fusion between prolog and haskell already exists: its called mercury. Its a statically compiled language with decent performance characteristics (at least, in its category).
- tluyben2 7y ago
  Mercury was pretty good last I tried and a very interesting language at that; I like Prolog and did quite a lot of work in it in the 90s (mostly research). I like how clean it looks (that's from Prolog) and the performance is great due to the fact that you give quite a lot of info to the compiler when you are programming (see for instance [0]). It has many backends it compiles to (Java, .NET, Erlang, native; not sure how well they are all maintained). It is a shame that not more people are working on the language and that not more people use it; I think there was not enough hype surrounding it. I gave up as it could not produce native code for ARM, a platform I always need for everything I do (for many years already), so to take a language seriously as something to dive in, it needs to have ARM support. Not sure what the state of that is now; this is many years ago. [0] https://www.mercurylang.org/information/doc-latest/mercury_ref/Determinism-categories.html https://www.mercurylang.org/information/doc-latest/mercury_r...
  - pdimitar 7y ago
    As a general comment and talking about myself exclusively, it's a new kind of fatigue that I would call "oh look, another programming language". There are quite a few very interesting and solid languages out there. One example for something that's not nearly well enough utilised or used widely is OCaml -- although in its case the lack of true multicore CPU support definitely cripples interest. But the language has an amazing type system that catches a _TON_ of errors (maybe even more than Rust's compiler, not entirely sure). And its compiler is just lightning-fast, fastest I've ever seen in fact. And it is multi-paradigm language (OOP and functional, and a lot of interesting typing constructs on top, half of which I don't even understand). Etc. Not advocating for OCaml by the way (I work with Elixir and am looking to get better at Rust lately). It's just an example demonstrating that, again, there are a good amount of very solid languages and runtimes out there but we the programmers are so busy either (a) belonging to tribes or (b) being so damn busy we can't look beyond the tech we do our daily job with -- and then a lot of excellent tech gets left in the dust. :( Mercury might be one of these tech pieces. And it's definitely not the only one.

crazypython 7y ago

It seems to me that if we can merge https://github.com/Syniurge/Calypso https://github.com/Syniurge/Calypso into LDC, we can get a language that is easier to understand and compiles faster than C++, Dlang.

falcolas 7y ago

Identifying the right characteristics in data, and creating properly tagged corpuses of data that correspond with the right characteristics is no less work than writing code. Not to mention manually written algorithms are, in many cases, more accurate than ML heuristics (for a terrible yet relevant example in the finance industry, identifying the correct sum of a set of numbers).

sly010 7y ago

Why not both?

jobseeker990 7y ago

What about Rust or D? OR even Go-lang?

quotemstr 7y ago

I don't think the new interest in compiled language reflects anything other than ongoing cyclical changes in fashion. Neither "compiled" nor "interpreted" language families (the terms are vague and the same language can fall in both categories) has a slam dunk performance advantage over the other. > I expect that programming in the future will be more about getting the AI to do what you want rather than writing code directly. This is the clear endgame. The question is how long it takes to get there.

throwaway17_17 7y ago
It’s a small semantic nitpick, but I think that you have to qualify the domain of conversation in stating: ‘neither “compiled” or “interpreted” language families ... has a slam dunk performance advantage over the other.’ If this is universally qualified, where are the scientific HPC simulations written in python, AAA video games written in Haskell, and fin tech trading apps written in Lisp? I am not stating that there are no places where compiled vs interpreted can never produce acceptable results, it’s just more nuanced than a forall type proposition. Addendum: I am aware C# could sort of be ‘interpreted’ and Unity is C#, so there is at least some evidence in the game category, but I’d quibble over the best-in-class C#/Unity game being considered 100% C#.
- sudosysgen 7y ago
  Unity is also quite far from being known for the best performance.

cmdshiftf4 7y ago

>The renewed interest in C++ and other compiled languages is an indication of the need to get more efficient. I kind of disagree with this based on intuition alone. Most developers, professional developers, are using web tech (JS stack in particular - Node and hyped front-end frameworks). Yet we"re seeing "interest" in compiled languages such as Rust, despite almost nobody using it professionally and almost nobody doing much with it outside of simple proof of concepts. To me it points toward a developing sense of insecurity in modern professional developers that simply being a JS dev isn't really programming/development and they've to "prove" themselves with lower level tech. Something that indicates that, for me, is in StackOverflow's 2019 survey [0] the most used tech was JS and that which surrounds it, followed by Python and other easy-to-get-going-well-supported tech. Yet the "Most Loved" was Rust. I could be wrong, and I'm open to being, but I intuitively I don't believe the interest in performant technologies is in the face of the sheer bloat we've seen, particularly from the web-front. >Programmer skill will become more important in the future. My prediction on this, not so AI specific, is that developing and deploying web-tech will continue to become easier and easier, meaning it'll take less people to do it. Sure, work may arise from developing countries/economies to supplant a drop in demand for it in the developed world, but maybe not. Combined with a potential bubble burst in tech, I think those relying on web dev for a living could be in trouble in the coming decade. I don't foresee much in terms of companies trying to optimize operational costs by instructing their devs to write their code more efficiently with memory/performance in mind to reduce operating costs, and thus spur a push toward jumping on compiled languages. If anything, cloud computing will continue to get cheaper and cheaper as the big 3 continue to try and absorb as much marketshare as possible. [0] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#overview https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#overview

steveklabnik 7y ago
Rust is used for far more than proofs of concept, and is deployed at some of the largest tech companies in some of their key products.
- cmdshiftf4 7y ago
  Not disagreeing with that. Although, in re-reading the above, I have made a grave mistake above, contrasting most used with most loved. SO's "most loved" is measured by "of those professional using this language, how many responded that they love using it", so in the case of Rust it's 83.5% of the 3% using it professionally. In retrospect I think my point would be better made by pointing at the difference between the technologies being used professionally and the technologies "most wanted", where Go and Rust are in the top 20% of wanted but the bottom 40% for Go and bottom 20% for Rust. I'll leave the original intact for posterity but what's cited is done so erroneously.

c-cube 7y ago

I'm hopeful about Crystal filling this niche in the future.