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It would be interesting to know how long the author has been developing software. For me, this is the kind of stuff I questioned in my first few years. After I
by jcpst 3y ago
It would be interesting to know how long the author has been developing software.
For me, this is the kind of stuff I questioned in my first few years. After I productionalized a few real world systems for a business, the whole “dev street cred” thing lost it’s appeal. It wasn’t about some imaginary “dev purity” thing anymore, it was about being efficient and making sure I was contributing to the bottom line.
- SoftTalker 3y agoMaybe. I have been developing for over 30 years. I still use emacs, use logs and printf for debugging, and have never even looked at ChatGPT. I'm willing to admit I may be set in my ways but I get my work done.
- jcpst 3y agoGood point. They’re all just tools and patterns. The actual tools used _could_ save some time, but experience plus the capacity to reason about software is a bigger deal. The article just made me think of some devs that I’ve worked with that were obsessed with particular tooling (insert comment about a hammer and everything being a nail). I do keep an eye on emacs. It turned into mainly my org-mode editor, but the v29 article that hit the HN front page recently has me curious about trying more dev work with it.
- Turskarama 3y agoIt might be possible to do anything with a chisel that you can do with a CNC machine, but that doesn't in any way mean either choice is as reasonable as the other. I just can't see a genuine reason to not use a real IDE and debugger. You can even fall back on the same tools you had before with them! Using a debugger doesn't mean you can't also use print statements, but if I could only have one I'd pick the debugger every time.
- jiggawatts 3y agoNearly 40 years here — I exclusively use IDEs and debuggers and have done so since the early 1990s. Computers aren’t digital pencil and paper. They’re levers for the mind. If the 3 GHz processor just sits there idling, waiting patiently to copy some bytes from one buffer to another, it’s being wasted. It could be checking the syntax, looking up documentation, or chasing memory references in the debugger so I don’t have to.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoIt's crazy that there seems to be only one good ide in all this. The Jetbrains ones.
- jiggawatts 3y agoI’ve used the Borland IDEs, JetBrains, Visual Studio, VS Code, and Eclipse. Of those all are fine except Eclipse. Though if I had to rate them I would put JetBrains IDEA at the top because the refactoring capabilities are so good.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoWell vs and vs code and eclipse are clunky and slow. Borland I remember back in the day used to be pretty clunky too.
- devoutsalsa 3y agoI’ve used both debuggers and print/log statements. More recently, I’ve learned the value of even seeing if I’m in the right part of the code by inserting 1 / 0 (or any way to raise an exception if 1 / 0 doesn’t blow things up). If I can’t even get a bad arithmetic error, I don’t need to worry about the rest of it!
- RadiozRadioz 3y agoNot a constructive comment to the conversation, more an observation: It always amuses me when HN users play Top Trumps with age. Reminds me of the "32 year veteran distinguished engineer level at FAANG" [1]. It's like whoever's the oldest wins. Bonus points if you mention you're a parent and lack the free time to use the more pernickety tools. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36214735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36214735
- bsder 3y agoProgrammers had a very nice thing called "web search". Then advertising and spam ruined it. From my point of view, ChatGPT is simply an anti-spam algorithm which is finally restoring "web search" back to being useful. The problem is that there is no money in that. So, everybody is trying to apply all the ML/LLM/ChatGPT stuff to absolutely anything in the hopes of making some money.
- samtho 3y ago> From my point of view, ChatGPT is simply an anti-spam algorithm which is finally restoring "web search" back to being useful. For now, I imagine that advertisers are currently trying to find some way to adapt their platforms to have an LLM spit out their product via some paid prompt injection that a publisher can sell them.
- squeaky-clean 3y agoBing's Chatbot already does this. Ask it for recommendations on something likely to have advertisers bidding on it, like the best mattress for a side sleeper, the space heater for (X room size), etc.
- conradfr 3y agoA web search that stopped indexing in September 2021 though.
- kaba0 3y agoAnd is prone to hallucinating up random bullshit..
- mellosouls 3y agoIt would be interesting to know how long the author has been developing software It's on the About page: "I have been programming professionally for more than 30 years"