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This is an amazing demonstration, but I'm worried that when this goes mainstream, we'll inherit a ton of baggage from today's programming. Specifically: * The

This is an amazing demonstration, but I'm worried that when this goes mainstream, we'll inherit a ton of baggage from today's programming. Specifically: * The tests are written in BDD style "it('should xyz')", which programmers do in code like this for convenience. But if we're automating their creation, then actual human-readable Cucumber clauses would be more useful. Maybe the tests can be transpiled. This isn't the AI's fault, but more of a symptom of how the original spirit of BDD as a means for nonprogrammers to test business logic seems to have been lost. * React hooks and Redux syntax are somewhat contrived/derivative. The underlying concepts like functional reactive programming and reducers are great, but the syntax is often repetitive or verbose, with a lot of boilerplate to accomplish things that might be one-liners in other languages/frameworks. This is more of a critique of the state of web programming than of the AI's performance. * MVVM is a fine pattern, but at the end of the day, it's an awful lot of handwaving to accomplish limited functionality. What do I mean by that? Mainly that I question whether the frontend needs models, routes, controllers (which I realize are MVC), etc. I mourn that we lost the idempotent #nocode HTML of the 90s and are back to manually writing app interfaces by hand in Javascript (like we did for native desktop apps in the C++ OOP days) when custom elements/components would have been so much easier. HTMX combined with some kind of distributed serverless lambda functions (that are actually as simple as they should be) would reduce pages of code to a WYSIWYG document that nonprogrammers could edit. What I'm really getting at is that I envisioned programming going a different direction back in the late 90s. We got GPUs/TensorFlow and Docker and WebAssembly and Rust etc etc etc. And these things are all fine, but they're contrived/derivative too. More formal systems might look like multicore/multimemory transputers (or Lisp machines), native virtual machines with full sandboxing built in so anything can run anywhere, immutable and auto-parallelized languages like HigherOrderCO/HVM or true vector processing with GNU Octave (MATLAB) so that we don't have to manually manage vertex buffers or free memory, etc. I've had architectures in mind for better hardware and programming languages for about 25 years (that's why I got my computer engineering degree) but I will simply never have time to implement them. All I do is work and cope. I just keep watching as everyone reinvents the same imperative programming wheel over and over again. And honestly it's gone on so long that I almost don't even care anymore. It feels more appealing in middle age to maybe just go be a hermit, get out of tech. I've always known that someday I'd have to choose between programming and my life. Anyway, now that I'm way too old to begin the training, I wonder if AI might help to rapidly prototype truly innovating tools. Maybe more like J.A.R.V.I.S. where it's just on all of the time and can iterate on ideas at a superhuman rate to assist humans in their self-actualization. Then again, once we have that, it becomes trivial to implement the stuff that I rant about. Maybe we only have about 5-10 years until all of the problems are solved. I mean all of them, everywhere, in physics/chemistry/biology/etc. Rather than automating creative acts and play as AI is doing now. If the Singularity arrives in 2030 instead of 2040, that also seems like a strong incentive to go be a hermit. Does any of this resonate with anyone? That somehow everything has gone terribly wrong, but it's more of a hiccup than a crisis? That maybe the most impactful thing that any of us can do is.. wait for things to get better?

davidthewatson 4y ago
This is deeply resonant with me for the following reasons: 1) Age 2) BDD-style or what I call a madlib proxy for playing cucumber on TV. Not a fan having used it in an RoR context I can only call hipster-engineering, not what DHH described. 3) I just had the discussion on redux vs. datomic vs. riak with friends yesterday. 4) Ditto the conversation on MVVM and the implied constraint complexity of putting nodejs and chromium in the same deployment package and calling it electron while carrying on how simple it is relative to... a world where everything is actually native all the way down? 5) Me too on the CASE era. 6) Cue Donald Knuth on literate programming. One thing that cucumber is not, but I think taking another iteration at literate programming in light of GPT or LLMs is a good idea since Knuth is never wrong just 50 years ahead of time, but we needed a collaboration of human-computer agents that is patterned on a sensemaking protocol that can resolve subjective truth by consensus of man and machine. How else could you possibly resolve the fact that the SOTA lies to me on a daily basis while defending itself and its lack of veracity with force in what can only be seen as emulating the culture of one's parents. 7) Yes, AI should help on the iterations. Those short design sketch-to-demo we used to do at the design studio with sketch on Monday and demo on Friday should be much easier today to go from breakfast sketch to dinner demo, but I don't think they are. The tooling is radically better but that better has come at the cost of complexity and going sideways, neither of which are being fully felt and accounted for reflectively, i.e. they're not how you get to typing less and having the tools do the work because when they break, the debugging is mind-crushing. 8) I think the thing that's missing in the trivial part is that it's not actually trivial, but particularly because the software is the message and that insight stems from the fact that software has emergent properties such as extensibility, composability, and a resultant rate of change that make it very difficult to compare from decade to decade because software's fundamental disequilibrium stems from the fact that the full stack is in constant flux from a mad hatter's pop culture where we never sing the same song twice. There's value in theme and variations if it can be modeled as improvisational human-computer design pairing rather than yet another orchestration. Joe Beda was as right about improvisation as Knuth is about the art of computer programming. 9) I guess the t-shirt is: I'm not waiting... 10) In the immortal words of Raymond Loewy: Never leave well enough alone. If there's a set of artifacts in software that achieve what I hope for with AI, it's somewhere between Bret Victor and https://iolanguage.org/ https://iolanguage.org/

davidthewatson 4y ago

This is deeply resonant with me for the following reasons: 1) Age 2) BDD-style or what I call a madlib proxy for playing cucumber on TV. Not a fan having used it in an RoR context I can only call hipster-engineering, not what DHH described. 3) I just had the discussion on redux vs. datomic vs. riak with friends yesterday. 4) Ditto the conversation on MVVM and the implied constraint complexity of putting nodejs and chromium in the same deployment package and calling it electron while carrying on how simple it is relative to... a world where everything is actually native all the way down? 5) Me too on the CASE era. 6) Cue Donald Knuth on literate programming. One thing that cucumber is not, but I think taking another iteration at literate programming in light of GPT or LLMs is a good idea since Knuth is never wrong just 50 years ahead of time, but we needed a collaboration of human-computer agents that is patterned on a sensemaking protocol that can resolve subjective truth by consensus of man and machine. How else could you possibly resolve the fact that the SOTA lies to me on a daily basis while defending itself and its lack of veracity with force in what can only be seen as emulating the culture of one's parents. 7) Yes, AI should help on the iterations. Those short design sketch-to-demo we used to do at the design studio with sketch on Monday and demo on Friday should be much easier today to go from breakfast sketch to dinner demo, but I don't think they are. The tooling is radically better but that better has come at the cost of complexity and going sideways, neither of which are being fully felt and accounted for reflectively, i.e. they're not how you get to typing less and having the tools do the work because when they break, the debugging is mind-crushing. 8) I think the thing that's missing in the trivial part is that it's not actually trivial, but particularly because the software is the message and that insight stems from the fact that software has emergent properties such as extensibility, composability, and a resultant rate of change that make it very difficult to compare from decade to decade because software's fundamental disequilibrium stems from the fact that the full stack is in constant flux from a mad hatter's pop culture where we never sing the same song twice. There's value in theme and variations if it can be modeled as improvisational human-computer design pairing rather than yet another orchestration. Joe Beda was as right about improvisation as Knuth is about the art of computer programming. 9) I guess the t-shirt is: I'm not waiting... 10) In the immortal words of Raymond Loewy: Never leave well enough alone. If there's a set of artifacts in software that achieve what I hope for with AI, it's somewhere between Bret Victor and https://iolanguage.org/ https://iolanguage.org/