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> In essence what has happened in software development is that the level of abstraction has gone up while the machine has taken over more and more of the nitty

> In essence what has happened in software development is that the level of abstraction has gone up while the machine has taken over more and more of the nitty gritty details. From punchcards, to assembly, to COBOL, C, Perl, Java, Python, Erlang, Rust. I feel like there's currently a movement towards slightly lower abstraction, or at least simplified, consistent APIs, less magic. The rise of Go and Rust are examples of this. Typescript could be another, although the abstraction isn't really lower, it is once again an attempt to coerce JS into something workable. I get really frustrated writing Python or Rails these days due to the sheer magnitude of hidden magic that sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. To tie this thought in with generative AIs: Currently they seem to be much better at programming with relatively simple syntax. By far the largest success so far I had with shell. Basically I tested assisted writing the same tool in Python, Perl and shell, and the results in shell were close to perfect. ChatGPT was even able to accurately limit commands to specific OSs and shells, and was able to accurately summarize the functions of other shell scripts. So my prediction is that we will see a movement towards simpler, lower abstraction languages while Coding Assistants rise to take away the boring stuff from programming like looking up syntax, writing boilerplate, structuring files. Programmers will then have more time to think about delivering value to product, maintainability, and efficiency and correctness. One last addendum: ChatGPT is really incredible at assisting with sys admin stuff, my guess for why would be that there are a gazillion obscure forum entries going back to the 80s explaining basically everything there is to know, but these are hard to find or comprehend for humans. With an AI assistant, self-hosting becomes much easier, and another development could be for startups and smaller companies to move away from AWS et al, especially now that money is more expensive.

coffeebeqn 4y ago
Feels like a rediscovery of systems languages. I certainly love Go (and probably Rust once I look into it) because I almost never have the experience of searching and searching to find some concrete code rather than just layers and layers of interfaces.
ldhough 4y ago
I've also been considering the concept of "AI-amenable" programming languages recently, and I think it would be quite an interesting twist of history if lisps became once again the AI languages of choice because of their simplicity. Going from the language to write AIs in to the language that AIs write. Fwiw, GPT doesn't seem to write Clojure as well as Python or JS or even C++, which is obviously much more syntactically complex. That said there is probably an order of magnitude more training data for all of those.

coffeebeqn 4y ago

Feels like a rediscovery of systems languages. I certainly love Go (and probably Rust once I look into it) because I almost never have the experience of searching and searching to find some concrete code rather than just layers and layers of interfaces.

ldhough 4y ago

I've also been considering the concept of "AI-amenable" programming languages recently, and I think it would be quite an interesting twist of history if lisps became once again the AI languages of choice because of their simplicity. Going from the language to write AIs in to the language that AIs write. Fwiw, GPT doesn't seem to write Clojure as well as Python or JS or even C++, which is obviously much more syntactically complex. That said there is probably an order of magnitude more training data for all of those.