5 ms·

That would be nice for us, but it's unlikely. Knowing the subtlelties of memory management in the 80' didn't help the Ruby coders to create RoR and run Basecam

That would be nice for us, but it's unlikely. Knowing the subtlelties of memory management in the 80' didn't help the Ruby coders to create RoR and run Basecamp, or the Python coders to create Django and run the Washington Post. People jumped at ORM, CSS frameworks and JS wrappers, and won the day because they traded memory and CPU for what the user wanted. The new generation will do the same. They will figure out how to be super productive with AI, way more than what we are. And our superpower will be useful in specialized cases, but mostly, their impacts will be small compared to the order of magnitude of speed they'll gain by using the new paradigm. People said interpreted languages were a waste, that you had to learn SQL, that Electron was an abomination. But the people building stuff always win, not what we think is the right way. That's why PHP won at some point. JS won at some point. And something super practical (but that will make us say uhh...) made by AI will win at some point. That's also why all the open letters and ethics committees will have no impact: the short term advantage given to AI users will be such that they will take everything over by storm. It's already happening in porn: we just gave millions of teenage boys a shiny new toy, and they are spending days and nights on it. New incredible models come out every day. Some hyper specialized. Last week, I saw a publication of a new model specially trained on only vagina called "bettervulva" and one for boobs called "breastinclass". Somebody spent hundreds of hours on those, collecting the data, annotating it, and training. I guarantee each niche of the world is doing exactly the same. Not to mention each new model is coded with somebody who has the previous models to help with the new one, code included. This is snowball from now on.

mcgannon2007 4y ago
Sort of off topic - but Django was actually created by the author of this post! But in Lawrence, KS to run a small little newspaper's site (Lawrence Journal-World). WaPo then adopted it, which was obviously a huge boon to the growth of the framework.
groestl 4y ago
> New incredible models come out every day The double meaning at play here...
ak_111 4y ago
You are sort of ignoring the bias in your own AI extremist prediction. People who have decided to go all in in learning an interpreted language like Perl or even PHP, had to continuously also learn react, js, ruby,... and gazillions of other languages and frameworks to remain in business over the last two decades. While people who invested in learning C, Java or SQL have as much healthy opportunities to pursue today with almost the same amount of knowledge that they had accumulated three decades ago. Their life has been much less stressful, pretty much on auto-pilot, while those who were pursuing the latest technology are constantly living on the edge having to continuously relearn entire new framework on average every 3-5 years to remain relevant. So yes all these glitzy languages have "won" but it wasn't by these "ancient" languages losing. If I had to bet I would say a decade from now, based on the last 50 years history of computing, I can easily imagine the same amount of jobs for C programmers as we have today but there will be as many Ruby jobs as we have perl jobs today.
- postexitus 4y ago
  There are no perl jobs.
  - ak_111 4y ago
    Exactly my point. You had proportionally as many perl jobs in the late 90s as you have Ruby jobs today. It even had early mover advantage in the scripting space and insanely good ecosystem of libraries.
  - weinzierl 4y ago
    I almost took one a little more than a year ago, and I wasn't even looking for one...
  - nibbleshifter 4y ago
    There are a considerable number of Perl jobs out there - just not many "greenfield" perl jobs. Most of them are maintaining existing codebases (not a fun job), and some are "help port this legacy codebase to not perl". I'd not discount Perl. Its incredibly fast to develop services in, stable as fuck, runs anywhere, performant (relatively), flexible, and if you were a startup looking to get a product out the door, just offer decent TC to a couple of old hands you can ship something viable fast.
w4ffl35 4y ago
"Teenage" lol. I have not stopped messing with Stable Diffusion and llms for like 7 months now and I've been a software engineer for 20 years. I use copilot and chatgpt and my own brain and have released two compiled python apps on itch ( first real apps I've ever built and released from the ground up on my own) - both are ai tools, one for stable diffusion one for flan-t5. I'll be releasing a unity solitaire game soon as well, and ive been training my own models. This is the most fun I've had creating things since I started programming.
- flir 4y ago
  > This is the most fun I've had creating things since I started programming. Definitely getting that vibe over here. I've been revisiting the exploration-style programming I was doing when I was young - Mandelbrot sets, Truchet tiles, all the old Computer Recreations columns stuff. Things you code up just to see what they look like. Being able to say "Turn this pseudocode into a Processing sketch" is a joyous thing.
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  It certainly makes me feel like a teenager lol.
nibbleshifter 4y ago
Electron is still an abomination. I've gone from hating PHP for most of my career, to now having a grudging appreciation for it. Its a clusterfuck, but it works really well, and deployment barely gets simpler than "untar into webroot, done".
- capableweb 4y ago
  There is still required setup for things like PHP, like what reads from the webroot and serves the requests. Other things, like binaries, can be almost completely self-contained and do everything, and then you just move the binary to the server and run it, and you get the full environment needed, no Apache with mod_php required (or what the kids use nowadays)
  - nibbleshifter 4y ago
    I'll grant you that. I also forgot briefly what a complete fucking nightmare instrumenting/debugging PHP (on say, a LAMP stack) can be - which is the inevitable result when PHP decides to behave in "interesting" ways.
- joenot443 4y ago
  I think what the GP is getting at is that one’s personal feelings about Electron do not matter whatsoever. There are fantastic billion dollar products built with the framework, that’s an objective fact. We can criticize it from a technical standpoint all we like, but the market is not something we can out reason. It’s a bit like calling e-scooters an abomination. It’s just an opinion, and one that certainly isn’t stopping money from being made.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
It think it depends on if your see SWE as creative or not. We've had plenty of tools to increase productivity and user experiences still suck too much too often. Making something easier doesn't necessarily increase quality. It's early days. It's a fool's errand tp try to predict the future. Now more than ever.
discreteevent 4y ago
> Knowing the subtlelties of memory management in the 80' didn't help the Ruby coders to create RoR and run Basecamp, or the Python coders to create Django and run the Washington Post Those programmers didn't need to know the subtleties of memory management because when they programmed in Ruby they didn't have to debug in C. GPT is very different.
norwalkbear 4y ago
I'm even seeing hyper specialized AI doing game mods
nigamanth 4y ago
On the contrary, if you don't know, then you don't know. If you're always needing to use ChatGPT or other LLMs then what happens in a world where they're unreliable?
- Karunamon 4y ago
  People move on to something else if they are "too" unreliable.
CuriouslyC 4y ago
Except that the pendulum has sung quite a bit in a few of those cases. Strong type systems that work best with a compile step have been clawing back ground from loosely typed dynamic languages, and the power and utility of Postgres/RDS has kicked off a mini SQL renaissance.

mcgannon2007 4y ago

Sort of off topic - but Django was actually created by the author of this post! But in Lawrence, KS to run a small little newspaper's site (Lawrence Journal-World). WaPo then adopted it, which was obviously a huge boon to the growth of the framework.

groestl 4y ago

> New incredible models come out every day The double meaning at play here...

ak_111 4y ago

You are sort of ignoring the bias in your own AI extremist prediction. People who have decided to go all in in learning an interpreted language like Perl or even PHP, had to continuously also learn react, js, ruby,... and gazillions of other languages and frameworks to remain in business over the last two decades. While people who invested in learning C, Java or SQL have as much healthy opportunities to pursue today with almost the same amount of knowledge that they had accumulated three decades ago. Their life has been much less stressful, pretty much on auto-pilot, while those who were pursuing the latest technology are constantly living on the edge having to continuously relearn entire new framework on average every 3-5 years to remain relevant. So yes all these glitzy languages have "won" but it wasn't by these "ancient" languages losing. If I had to bet I would say a decade from now, based on the last 50 years history of computing, I can easily imagine the same amount of jobs for C programmers as we have today but there will be as many Ruby jobs as we have perl jobs today.

postexitus 4y ago
There are no perl jobs.
- ak_111 4y ago
  Exactly my point. You had proportionally as many perl jobs in the late 90s as you have Ruby jobs today. It even had early mover advantage in the scripting space and insanely good ecosystem of libraries.
- weinzierl 4y ago
  I almost took one a little more than a year ago, and I wasn't even looking for one...
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  There are a considerable number of Perl jobs out there - just not many "greenfield" perl jobs. Most of them are maintaining existing codebases (not a fun job), and some are "help port this legacy codebase to not perl". I'd not discount Perl. Its incredibly fast to develop services in, stable as fuck, runs anywhere, performant (relatively), flexible, and if you were a startup looking to get a product out the door, just offer decent TC to a couple of old hands you can ship something viable fast.

w4ffl35 4y ago

"Teenage" lol. I have not stopped messing with Stable Diffusion and llms for like 7 months now and I've been a software engineer for 20 years. I use copilot and chatgpt and my own brain and have released two compiled python apps on itch ( first real apps I've ever built and released from the ground up on my own) - both are ai tools, one for stable diffusion one for flan-t5. I'll be releasing a unity solitaire game soon as well, and ive been training my own models. This is the most fun I've had creating things since I started programming.

flir 4y ago
> This is the most fun I've had creating things since I started programming. Definitely getting that vibe over here. I've been revisiting the exploration-style programming I was doing when I was young - Mandelbrot sets, Truchet tiles, all the old Computer Recreations columns stuff. Things you code up just to see what they look like. Being able to say "Turn this pseudocode into a Processing sketch" is a joyous thing.
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
It certainly makes me feel like a teenager lol.

nibbleshifter 4y ago

Electron is still an abomination. I've gone from hating PHP for most of my career, to now having a grudging appreciation for it. Its a clusterfuck, but it works really well, and deployment barely gets simpler than "untar into webroot, done".

capableweb 4y ago
There is still required setup for things like PHP, like what reads from the webroot and serves the requests. Other things, like binaries, can be almost completely self-contained and do everything, and then you just move the binary to the server and run it, and you get the full environment needed, no Apache with mod_php required (or what the kids use nowadays)
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  I'll grant you that. I also forgot briefly what a complete fucking nightmare instrumenting/debugging PHP (on say, a LAMP stack) can be - which is the inevitable result when PHP decides to behave in "interesting" ways.
joenot443 4y ago
I think what the GP is getting at is that one’s personal feelings about Electron do not matter whatsoever. There are fantastic billion dollar products built with the framework, that’s an objective fact. We can criticize it from a technical standpoint all we like, but the market is not something we can out reason. It’s a bit like calling e-scooters an abomination. It’s just an opinion, and one that certainly isn’t stopping money from being made.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

It think it depends on if your see SWE as creative or not. We've had plenty of tools to increase productivity and user experiences still suck too much too often. Making something easier doesn't necessarily increase quality. It's early days. It's a fool's errand tp try to predict the future. Now more than ever.

discreteevent 4y ago

> Knowing the subtlelties of memory management in the 80' didn't help the Ruby coders to create RoR and run Basecamp, or the Python coders to create Django and run the Washington Post Those programmers didn't need to know the subtleties of memory management because when they programmed in Ruby they didn't have to debug in C. GPT is very different.

norwalkbear 4y ago

I'm even seeing hyper specialized AI doing game mods

nigamanth 4y ago

On the contrary, if you don't know, then you don't know. If you're always needing to use ChatGPT or other LLMs then what happens in a world where they're unreliable?

Karunamon 4y ago
People move on to something else if they are "too" unreliable.

CuriouslyC 4y ago

Except that the pendulum has sung quite a bit in a few of those cases. Strong type systems that work best with a compile step have been clawing back ground from loosely typed dynamic languages, and the power and utility of Postgres/RDS has kicked off a mini SQL renaissance.