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It's true. Nobody writes (assembly) code anymore; machines do all that work now. (For that matter, having spent a lot of my career working on compilers, it's n

It's true. Nobody writes (assembly) code anymore; machines do all that work now. (For that matter, having spent a lot of my career working on compilers, it's notable that nobody really writes code generators anymore, either! It's all been done already.) When I started coding, memory management was all basically manual, but machines do all that work now. Yes, coding is a dying profession - but it always has been, and a new profession of coding is perpetually being born atop the old abstractions, as the work continues; because the work is not really about the details of the machines, except incidentally, but about understanding the problems and the needs well enough to express them in whatever the current language of the machines happens to be.

anonzzzies 3y ago
We are still doing a stupid amount of low level stuff (at least in our heads) now. I thought end 70/80s, with lisp, apl and even basic that we didn’t need to worry about memory management, cycle mangement, etc, anymore, but now, half a century later, we still have to, because if you don’t, everything is laggy, leaky, OOMing, killing the browser, eating the battery, costing stupid cloud $ etc. The abstractions often suck so much that I long for the manual stuff (and do when I am doing embedded programming for 20kb 2mhz devices); it is usually far more enjoyable as you can reason about it in a very goal oriented way. And yes, abstracting a human problem to something logical was always the actual job of programming and that will remain for a while; LLMs are terrible at it so far. When your brain manages to cut it up in small pieces of logic, LLMs do puke out the code that fits with bizarre speed. That code often suffers from not taking into account performance and memory management though, and thus make up a terrible app in the end.
caeril 3y ago
> memory management was all basically manual, but machines do all that work now. Yes, and that has not been a good thing. The advent and success of Zig and Rust are a modern recognition that outsourcing memory management to a stop-the-world process has been an abysmal failure.

anonzzzies 3y ago

We are still doing a stupid amount of low level stuff (at least in our heads) now. I thought end 70/80s, with lisp, apl and even basic that we didn’t need to worry about memory management, cycle mangement, etc, anymore, but now, half a century later, we still have to, because if you don’t, everything is laggy, leaky, OOMing, killing the browser, eating the battery, costing stupid cloud $ etc. The abstractions often suck so much that I long for the manual stuff (and do when I am doing embedded programming for 20kb 2mhz devices); it is usually far more enjoyable as you can reason about it in a very goal oriented way. And yes, abstracting a human problem to something logical was always the actual job of programming and that will remain for a while; LLMs are terrible at it so far. When your brain manages to cut it up in small pieces of logic, LLMs do puke out the code that fits with bizarre speed. That code often suffers from not taking into account performance and memory management though, and thus make up a terrible app in the end.

caeril 3y ago

> memory management was all basically manual, but machines do all that work now. Yes, and that has not been a good thing. The advent and success of Zig and Rust are a modern recognition that outsourcing memory management to a stop-the-world process has been an abysmal failure.