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When I was in school and search was becoming a thing, the teacher said something that resonated with me for all these years. "It's going to be less and le

by keyle 2y ago

When I was in school and search was becoming a thing, the teacher said something that resonated with me for all these years. "It's going to be less and less about knowing, and becoming more and more about knowing where to find the answer". That held true for search and that holds true with AI coding assistant. From knowing how to use google search, to knowing how to prompt to get a reasonable clue. We've just added a new meta to the problem solving puzzle: is the computer giving me the right answer or is it confidently throwing me a red herring. We've gone from knowing the code we run, to barely understanding how the compiler does it, to having no clue what is happening... Soon enough someone will invent an OS where everything is done by speech or thoughts; and typing on keyboard will become a thing of the past, like hand writing... Programming will be done on the fly by the user's request and the computer will be compiling and executing it with a high degree of confidence. This is a future that is more likely to happen before the thinking machines really happen.

AlienRobot 2y ago
I've observed another meta as well: IDEs/language servers. I was writing a Wordpress plugin and by default in PHP all function definitions are global, e.g. is_single that WP defines is global. Naturally to avoid conflicts you would use a namespace, but since most of the examples I saw used prefixed function names, I decided to try that as well. In my opinion, coding just feels much clearer when you prefix all your names, like my_library_my_func. When I see my_library_, I just immediately know that is my code. If you use different prefixes for different modules, you can tell from a glance which modules a piece of code interacts with. In C++, you can tell a random word is a field by the simple fact everyone prefixes them with m_. I've seen people using prefixes for pointers as well. This is the same concept you have when designing an UI. Everyone agrees a problem with hamburger menus is that you don't know what's inside the burger until you click on it. If you want people to be aware something exists, you need to make it appear on screen, explicitly. Instead, languages have evolved toward the very opposite. We ran away from self-documentating variable names and prefixes, and toward namespaces, "const" and other keywords, and "OOP" that feels less object-orientated and more press-the-dot-key-to-get-a-list-of-methods orientated. We depend on docstrings that show in the IDE, and then on auto-generated documentation from those docstrings. Typescript is probably the worst case of this, because it gives you a lot of tools to make the dot work the way you want, you'll spend way too much tinkering with the dot instead of just writing code that actually runs. Thanks to this, when you look at code, you have to wait until your language server figures out what you're looking at for you. If the IDE doesn't work, it's effectively impossible to code anything in many cases. But the variable names are shorter so people think it's cleaner and better, like removing features from an UI to make it cleaner.
- keyle 2y ago
  You've highlighted why I migrated from being a front-end dev to a backend dev, as close to the metal as possible. The upper layers are a shitshow. LSP are useful but some languages are becoming useless - harder than they should be - without LSP, and that's going too far.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    > as close to the metal as possible Seems like a bold claim. Care to back it up?
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  > We ran away from self-documentating variable names and prefixes, and toward namespaces namespace Gujarati { class Masala { ... } } Gujarati::Masala m; // variable with required namespace using namespace Gujarati; Masala m2; // variable with implicit namespace Gujarati::Masala m3; // variable with unnecessary explicit namespace namespace Bengali { Gujarati::Masala the_masala; } Bengali::the_masala = ....; using namespace Bengali; the_masala = ....; Bengali::the_masala = ...; AKA "do watcha wanna do"
  - selimthegrim 2y ago
    Especially since most Bengalis would say moshla...
- raincole 2y ago
  You just reinvented Hungarian notation (the bad version).
- diarrhea 2y ago
  A language where every definition is global is the worst starting point imaginable. Of course, solutions to that will remain severely lacking. Prefixed variables as you propose were abandoned for good reason. Perhaps give Rust or Python, maybe Go a spin, and see how they do namespaces, imports and such. I find that mostly sane and readable, as they retain the full chain of custody (you can always trace where a symbol comes from by its qualification or import statement, unlike in less sane ecosystems such as C/C++/C#/Java, and apparently the insane version PHP uses).
noobermin 2y ago
So, this sucks btw. Some people would make much better code if they at least had a working model of how computers actually compute.
- ratg13 2y ago
  Your parent comment is literally describing the ‘push button to diagnose patient’ “doctor” machine in idiocracy, and lauding its coming. A somber harbinger of our near future.
  - peteradio 2y ago
    No worries girl! Plenty of tards livin kick ass lives! My first wife was tarded, now she works at microsfot.
LouisSayers 2y ago
> That held true for search and that holds true with AI coding assistant. 100% - this was not obvious to me until I was working at a startup and delegated a task to some others. They tried for close to an hour to find a solution to a problem and came up empty handed. I had a go and instantly found the answer. What was the difference? It was our ability to put into Google the right terms to find the answer. Already I find myself doing most coding via AI, with my work being high level skills (choosing how to organise code, knowing when to refactor and when the AI has gone too far). The productivity increase is crazy. The future quite likely will look like the minority report interface.
joshstrange 2y ago
I’m impressed by your teacher’s foresight. That’s _exactly_ how I see it. I don’t memorize things, I just know _how_ to find them when I need them. You can store a much larger “index” in your head than raw knowledge, which is what I strive for.
gtirloni 2y ago
The problem is that going from assembly to advanced compilers still produced the same output every time with variations based on you selecting them from a limited pool of options. With LLMs, statistics play a much more important role so you're really not in the same realm anymore. It's like going from digital to analog, things work differently at a core level.
yoyohello13 2y ago
I still believe that warhammer 40K is the most accurate depiction of advanced tech. We will all just become tech priests praying to the machine spirit to get the computer to do what we want.

by keyle 2y ago

AlienRobot 2y ago

I've observed another meta as well: IDEs/language servers. I was writing a Wordpress plugin and by default in PHP all function definitions are global, e.g. is_single that WP defines is global. Naturally to avoid conflicts you would use a namespace, but since most of the examples I saw used prefixed function names, I decided to try that as well. In my opinion, coding just feels much clearer when you prefix all your names, like my_library_my_func. When I see my_library_, I just immediately know that is my code. If you use different prefixes for different modules, you can tell from a glance which modules a piece of code interacts with. In C++, you can tell a random word is a field by the simple fact everyone prefixes them with m_. I've seen people using prefixes for pointers as well. This is the same concept you have when designing an UI. Everyone agrees a problem with hamburger menus is that you don't know what's inside the burger until you click on it. If you want people to be aware something exists, you need to make it appear on screen, explicitly. Instead, languages have evolved toward the very opposite. We ran away from self-documentating variable names and prefixes, and toward namespaces, "const" and other keywords, and "OOP" that feels less object-orientated and more press-the-dot-key-to-get-a-list-of-methods orientated. We depend on docstrings that show in the IDE, and then on auto-generated documentation from those docstrings. Typescript is probably the worst case of this, because it gives you a lot of tools to make the dot work the way you want, you'll spend way too much tinkering with the dot instead of just writing code that actually runs. Thanks to this, when you look at code, you have to wait until your language server figures out what you're looking at for you. If the IDE doesn't work, it's effectively impossible to code anything in many cases. But the variable names are shorter so people think it's cleaner and better, like removing features from an UI to make it cleaner.

keyle 2y ago
You've highlighted why I migrated from being a front-end dev to a backend dev, as close to the metal as possible. The upper layers are a shitshow. LSP are useful but some languages are becoming useless - harder than they should be - without LSP, and that's going too far.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  > as close to the metal as possible Seems like a bold claim. Care to back it up?
PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
> We ran away from self-documentating variable names and prefixes, and toward namespaces namespace Gujarati { class Masala { ... } } Gujarati::Masala m; // variable with required namespace using namespace Gujarati; Masala m2; // variable with implicit namespace Gujarati::Masala m3; // variable with unnecessary explicit namespace namespace Bengali { Gujarati::Masala the_masala; } Bengali::the_masala = ....; using namespace Bengali; the_masala = ....; Bengali::the_masala = ...; AKA "do watcha wanna do"
- selimthegrim 2y ago
  Especially since most Bengalis would say moshla...
raincole 2y ago
You just reinvented Hungarian notation (the bad version).
diarrhea 2y ago
A language where every definition is global is the worst starting point imaginable. Of course, solutions to that will remain severely lacking. Prefixed variables as you propose were abandoned for good reason. Perhaps give Rust or Python, maybe Go a spin, and see how they do namespaces, imports and such. I find that mostly sane and readable, as they retain the full chain of custody (you can always trace where a symbol comes from by its qualification or import statement, unlike in less sane ecosystems such as C/C++/C#/Java, and apparently the insane version PHP uses).

noobermin 2y ago

So, this sucks btw. Some people would make much better code if they at least had a working model of how computers actually compute.

ratg13 2y ago
Your parent comment is literally describing the ‘push button to diagnose patient’ “doctor” machine in idiocracy, and lauding its coming. A somber harbinger of our near future.
- peteradio 2y ago
  No worries girl! Plenty of tards livin kick ass lives! My first wife was tarded, now she works at microsfot.

LouisSayers 2y ago

> That held true for search and that holds true with AI coding assistant. 100% - this was not obvious to me until I was working at a startup and delegated a task to some others. They tried for close to an hour to find a solution to a problem and came up empty handed. I had a go and instantly found the answer. What was the difference? It was our ability to put into Google the right terms to find the answer. Already I find myself doing most coding via AI, with my work being high level skills (choosing how to organise code, knowing when to refactor and when the AI has gone too far). The productivity increase is crazy. The future quite likely will look like the minority report interface.

joshstrange 2y ago

I’m impressed by your teacher’s foresight. That’s _exactly_ how I see it. I don’t memorize things, I just know _how_ to find them when I need them. You can store a much larger “index” in your head than raw knowledge, which is what I strive for.

gtirloni 2y ago

The problem is that going from assembly to advanced compilers still produced the same output every time with variations based on you selecting them from a limited pool of options. With LLMs, statistics play a much more important role so you're really not in the same realm anymore. It's like going from digital to analog, things work differently at a core level.

yoyohello13 2y ago

I still believe that warhammer 40K is the most accurate depiction of advanced tech. We will all just become tech priests praying to the machine spirit to get the computer to do what we want.