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Doing "more" of the same, throwing more bodies at it, rewriting the world because your UI or ORM needs a reboot, trying to attach checksums and technica

Doing "more" of the same, throwing more bodies at it, rewriting the world because your UI or ORM needs a reboot, trying to attach checksums and technical proxies for dependencies as a substitute for the basic fact that you need to know what code you are running and why to be a responsible software vendor; none of this will work. You're assuming that the "bodies" being thrown are going to continue to be human. But what if they aren't? We've already seen what can be done with the very early, relatively primitive AI programming assitants that we have today. What happens when we're competing against an army of Java/Python/Go programmers, all of whom have extensive AI assistance? I love Lisp. All Lisps. Common Lisp. Scheme. Clojure. Even elisp. And, for a long time I thought Lisp was the future. I thought, like you, that the ever expanding size of codebases written in more conventional programming languages would necessitate a switch to something more functional and more amenable to building non-leaky layers of abstraction because that would be the only way to continue to build without introducing at least one bug for every new feature. However, the advent of LLM powered coding assistants (like OpenAI's Codex, or Github's Copilot) has made me reassess my view. LLMs benefit from having more training data. Now, the thing that I thought would kill Java/Python/Go codebases, i.e. the sheer number of lines of code required to do even the simplest thing, turns out to be a strength. Because each line (and all its variants) now represents a datum point in the training set for the AI. Can Lisp be enhanced with AI support. Sure it can, in theory. But in practice, there's far less Lisp code out there. Primarily this is because far fewer people use Lisp on a regular basis. But it's also because, for any given task, far less code is required to accomplish it. Just like Java's greatest weakness turned out to be a strength in a world where we have AI assistance, Lisp's greatest strength turns out to be a weakness. I'm going to continue to use Lisp wherever I can. If not at work, then in my projects at home. But I'm far less sanguine today about the eventual dominance of Lisp (and Lisp-like languages) than I have been at any time in the past.

cbrozefsky 4y ago
We've reached peak HN irony when someone asks and then poo poos the idea of Lisp being enhanced with AI support...
- quanticle 4y ago
  I appreciate the irony, but the kind of AI that Lisp was designed for (i.e. automated reasoning, expert systems, etc) is really not the same as the kind of AI that we have today. The AI we have today is very much a "worse-is-better" [1] AI. There's no elegance. No craftmanship. Just scale and raw power. And just like worse-is-better programming languages conquered Lisp, worse-is-better AI approaches conquered the classical approaches that were pioneered along with Lisp. It might be ironic, but I don't see any particular contradiction in saying that worse-is-better AI magnifies the advantages of worse-is-better programming languages. [1]: https://www.dreamsongs.com/WIB.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/WIB.html
  - cbrozefsky 4y ago
    I paid for a house for myself, and one for my family with lisp, oh and a small cabin in the woods and a couple touring motorcycles. It was clojure specifically. It was precisely the automated reasoning and expert system you say is not the same kind of AI. We did some of that too, but it was peripheral and at most was an input and support for the captured and encoded and refined knowledge of human experts. That project helped pay for many houses and send kids to college, and otherwise help hundreds make a living. Before that, I did some java and ruby, which was fun and helped pay rent. But before that I helped pay for many houses and even apartment buildings with Common Lisp. That project has paid for houses and school and living for many dozens of people over the last 20 years. It's still going. I am not interesting in conquering anything, or winning anything, or what momentum or the power law, or economies of scale, or momentum or other efficiencies of industrial software production. People trot out those arguments all the time to explain why something can't be done, or why they can't do what they want to do, or why something they hate is winning or inevitable. Believe in yourself and your compatriots, and if you wanna do it with lisp, find some better compatriots. Cheers.
bcrosby95 4y ago
I was thinking this when ChatGPT came out too. And not just Lisps - any new, or niche language. The barrier to entry is going to be much, much higher.

cbrozefsky 4y ago

We've reached peak HN irony when someone asks and then poo poos the idea of Lisp being enhanced with AI support...

quanticle 4y ago
I appreciate the irony, but the kind of AI that Lisp was designed for (i.e. automated reasoning, expert systems, etc) is really not the same as the kind of AI that we have today. The AI we have today is very much a "worse-is-better" [1] AI. There's no elegance. No craftmanship. Just scale and raw power. And just like worse-is-better programming languages conquered Lisp, worse-is-better AI approaches conquered the classical approaches that were pioneered along with Lisp. It might be ironic, but I don't see any particular contradiction in saying that worse-is-better AI magnifies the advantages of worse-is-better programming languages. [1]: https://www.dreamsongs.com/WIB.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/WIB.html
- cbrozefsky 4y ago
  I paid for a house for myself, and one for my family with lisp, oh and a small cabin in the woods and a couple touring motorcycles. It was clojure specifically. It was precisely the automated reasoning and expert system you say is not the same kind of AI. We did some of that too, but it was peripheral and at most was an input and support for the captured and encoded and refined knowledge of human experts. That project helped pay for many houses and send kids to college, and otherwise help hundreds make a living. Before that, I did some java and ruby, which was fun and helped pay rent. But before that I helped pay for many houses and even apartment buildings with Common Lisp. That project has paid for houses and school and living for many dozens of people over the last 20 years. It's still going. I am not interesting in conquering anything, or winning anything, or what momentum or the power law, or economies of scale, or momentum or other efficiencies of industrial software production. People trot out those arguments all the time to explain why something can't be done, or why they can't do what they want to do, or why something they hate is winning or inevitable. Believe in yourself and your compatriots, and if you wanna do it with lisp, find some better compatriots. Cheers.

bcrosby95 4y ago

I was thinking this when ChatGPT came out too. And not just Lisps - any new, or niche language. The barrier to entry is going to be much, much higher.