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I have been coding for 22 years, never thought of myself as programmer, programming for me is like literacy, it's like calling yourself a 'reader' because you c

I have been coding for 22 years, never thought of myself as programmer, programming for me is like literacy, it's like calling yourself a 'reader' because you can read. Programming is a first order thinking, a way to deconstruct and construct things, sometimes you have to use it on a computer, sometimes you have to use it while baking bread, or while woodworking. AI will help me so much, I am super excited, and now I use it every day, I plugged in whisper+chatgpt[1] to my emacs and now it is more and more like a partner, it is of course still stupid, but it will get better, and soon (with the recent llama work people are doing) I hope we will be able to finetune it. We are doing lists and tables and data transformations and input validation for 60 years now, we built gazillion specialised spreadsheet clones.. I think now we can start building some new things, some really "soft" software, where the users can program it with language. This is the first time I feel the computer is helping me do something, and its not me "fighting" with it. [1] https://github.com/jackdoe/emacs-chatgpt-jarvis https://github.com/jackdoe/emacs-chatgpt-jarvis

noduerme 4y ago
Look, most good programming is not the simple data transformations, read/write, CRUD, etc. even though that is most day-to-day busywork we have to deal with. Good programming is envisioning a whole set of behaviours and the architecture to support them, before a line of code is ever written. If an AI can bang out the boilerplate for you once you know what you want, that's great. But like any tool, relying on it to do all things will lead to places where you're at a crossroads and might take the way the tool suggests instead of continuing along your intention to build something the way you conceived of it. And the tool may seem to "know" - but it doesn't, and it shouldn't guide you (anymore than, say, taking the path of least resistance with React should guide your decisions about app architecture). Lists and tables aren't an unsolved problem anymore. Good programming is about solving the problems that haven't been solved yet. But an AI is trained on existing art, and can only follow paths that have already been trodden.
- throwaway71271 4y ago
  i am sad to say that lists and tables are totally unsolved problems, look how many issues there are in react's virtualized list[1] (just an example, not picking on react) but i think we are talking about the same thing :) programming is creative, and for me it is art, i love it. https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues?q=is%3Aissue+virtualized+list https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues?q=is%3Aissue...
  - noduerme 4y ago
    Yeah, I think we're talking about the same thing. But taking your example, virtualized list problems recur every few years. They were a problem in Swing, in JSwing, in Flex, Flash, on and on. I mostly use DataTables, which is its own endless hall of mirrors. They're among the glitchiest UI elements because so many things come into play. They try to do everything and be everything for every application and for all browsers, right? But more importantly, there are a lot of different ways of approaching the problem of virtual lists. You could do offscreen rendering in the DOM, or render on the fly, or reuse existing elements, or go nuts and draw the whole thing on a Canvas. So this is like the last thing you would want to rely on an AI to actually write. You could definitely let it embed some existing solution, but then you wouldn't know why it had some code that shifted everything down 3px for Safari.

noduerme 4y ago

Look, most good programming is not the simple data transformations, read/write, CRUD, etc. even though that is most day-to-day busywork we have to deal with. Good programming is envisioning a whole set of behaviours and the architecture to support them, before a line of code is ever written. If an AI can bang out the boilerplate for you once you know what you want, that's great. But like any tool, relying on it to do all things will lead to places where you're at a crossroads and might take the way the tool suggests instead of continuing along your intention to build something the way you conceived of it. And the tool may seem to "know" - but it doesn't, and it shouldn't guide you (anymore than, say, taking the path of least resistance with React should guide your decisions about app architecture). Lists and tables aren't an unsolved problem anymore. Good programming is about solving the problems that haven't been solved yet. But an AI is trained on existing art, and can only follow paths that have already been trodden.

throwaway71271 4y ago
i am sad to say that lists and tables are totally unsolved problems, look how many issues there are in react's virtualized list[1] (just an example, not picking on react) but i think we are talking about the same thing :) programming is creative, and for me it is art, i love it. https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues?q=is%3Aissue+virtualized+list https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues?q=is%3Aissue...
- noduerme 4y ago
  Yeah, I think we're talking about the same thing. But taking your example, virtualized list problems recur every few years. They were a problem in Swing, in JSwing, in Flex, Flash, on and on. I mostly use DataTables, which is its own endless hall of mirrors. They're among the glitchiest UI elements because so many things come into play. They try to do everything and be everything for every application and for all browsers, right? But more importantly, there are a lot of different ways of approaching the problem of virtual lists. You could do offscreen rendering in the DOM, or render on the fly, or reuse existing elements, or go nuts and draw the whole thing on a Canvas. So this is like the last thing you would want to rely on an AI to actually write. You could definitely let it embed some existing solution, but then you wouldn't know why it had some code that shifted everything down 3px for Safari.