4 ms·

In the age of AI, i'm never using obscure languages again because AI isn't as good with them

by snapcaster 1y ago

nolok 1y ago
Object pascal is many things, obscure it is not
- StableAlkyne 1y ago
  Probably depends on your specific company or industry Personally I've never seen anyone use Pascal as anything other than the butt of a joke or a background slide on "how far we've come" since the 80s. Nobody even seems to remember object Pascal. ... But I'm also in a sector that routinely relies on Fortran code so ymmv
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Ever heard of Mac OS and a company called Apple?
    - maleldil 1y ago
      Is Pascal still used on macOS today? Pascal/Delphi was relevant 20 years ago, but it isn't anymore.
      - pjmlp 1y ago
        Of course not, because that wasn't what I wrote. I wrote Mac OS, which was replaced by OS X. macOS is a rebranding from OS X. Delphi is pretty much relevant in Germany, to this day there are conferences to attend to. You can still get tickets for this year, https://entwickler-konferenz.de/en/ https://entwickler-konferenz.de/en/
    - ndiddy 1y ago
      It lasted for a few years as a first-class supported language, but by the early 90s they shifted most of their focus to C++ so the system API being in Pascal became more of a legacy annoyance than anything. You got to deal with Str255 types, putting "\p" at the start of all your string literals, remembering the rules for when to pass by reference or pass by value when you call toolbox functions, etc.
      - pjmlp 1y ago
        The fact is that without Object Pascal, there would not exist employees to work on MPW at all, or even Apple most likely. Maybe in some alternative universe they would have been just as successful using BCPL, but the fact C and C++ were ignored at Apple until some employees came up with MPW as side project until it was too late to turn back, speaks volumes about Apple culture. Just as it does the way A/UX was originally designed.
        ndiddy 1y ago
        Apple officially supported C for Macintosh application development even back when they were still making devs do all their work on Lisas (see http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/lisa/workshop_3.0/Lisa_Workshop_C_Users_Guide_1985.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/lisa/workshop_3.0/Lisa_Wo...), but you're right that they were a majority Pascal shop until they shifted to C++ around when System 7 came out.
        pjmlp 1y ago
        It did, as userspace tooling for customers, the system was written in a mix of Assembly and Clascal, Object Pascal predecessor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clascal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clascal
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - baranul 1y ago
    People were not laughing at Turbo Pascal or Delphi when they came out, and they dominated for many years. Delphi/Object Pascal is still taught in the schools of many countries. There are people who want everyone to forget Delphi/Object Pascal and they wish it was dead. But what they wish for and reality are two different things. Delphi still makes money, otherwise they wouldn't sell it.
massung 1y ago
By that logic, if modern LLMs existed in the 80s, you’d have never learned Haskell, Ocaml, Rust, Go, Erlang, … and all the cool concepts and ideas that came with them. You’d still be programming Basic and Fortran, simply because that’s all the models knew. AI may be helpful at times, but to limit one’s self to only the knowledge and experience they have is… short sighted at best.
- coliveira 1y ago
  Unfortunately this is what AI is leading to. People will stop learning new languages and companies will stop developing new ones because AI is now supposed to write code.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    I agree, I envison that we will reach a state where the tooling will be generating executables directly. As next step of low code/no code tooling, the agent will do the actions for us. We are already seeing this on SaaS offerings.
- 3036e4 1y ago
  I tried to make some LLMs write (GW-)BASIC and they failed miserably. Maybe they were only trained on some modern BASIC that doesn't look like BASIC at all? Could not convince them to use line numbers at all. Maybe with a lot of context they could do it, but my prompts did not work, even making I clear I wanted line numbers. (Free)Pascal seems to work great though. I think enough of that is in training data that it can be used as well as any language. There isn't much special to consider to get it right. It is not like figuring out how to do Rust or C++.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
  People wanting shortcuts and to do less work/thinking is about to become the major force in society over the next generation.
  - azinman2 1y ago
johnisgood 1y ago
Feed it documentation and example code and given sufficient data of these, it will do just fine with obscure languages. I have tried it with programming languages as obscure as Odin, for example, and it worked nicely. It is way more awful writing Forth, for one. YMMV.
werdnapk 1y ago
Reinforces the A in AI... "artificial" intelligence. Actual intelligence could pick up a new language no problem.
yndoendo 1y ago
Programming languages are tools in a toolbox. Use the proper tool for the job instead of always picking up the hammer. It takes time to train and use a new tool. That applies to LLM and humans. Would you use the same drill to hang drywall and core through a concrete floor?

In the age of AI, i'm never using obscure languages again because AI isn't as good with them

nolok 1y ago

Object pascal is many things, obscure it is not

StableAlkyne 1y ago
Probably depends on your specific company or industry Personally I've never seen anyone use Pascal as anything other than the butt of a joke or a background slide on "how far we've come" since the 80s. Nobody even seems to remember object Pascal. ... But I'm also in a sector that routinely relies on Fortran code so ymmv
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Ever heard of Mac OS and a company called Apple?
  - maleldil 1y ago
    Is Pascal still used on macOS today? Pascal/Delphi was relevant 20 years ago, but it isn't anymore.
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      Of course not, because that wasn't what I wrote. I wrote Mac OS, which was replaced by OS X. macOS is a rebranding from OS X. Delphi is pretty much relevant in Germany, to this day there are conferences to attend to. You can still get tickets for this year, https://entwickler-konferenz.de/en/ https://entwickler-konferenz.de/en/
  - ndiddy 1y ago
    It lasted for a few years as a first-class supported language, but by the early 90s they shifted most of their focus to C++ so the system API being in Pascal became more of a legacy annoyance than anything. You got to deal with Str255 types, putting "\p" at the start of all your string literals, remembering the rules for when to pass by reference or pass by value when you call toolbox functions, etc.
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      The fact is that without Object Pascal, there would not exist employees to work on MPW at all, or even Apple most likely. Maybe in some alternative universe they would have been just as successful using BCPL, but the fact C and C++ were ignored at Apple until some employees came up with MPW as side project until it was too late to turn back, speaks volumes about Apple culture. Just as it does the way A/UX was originally designed.
      - ndiddy 1y ago
        Apple officially supported C for Macintosh application development even back when they were still making devs do all their work on Lisas (see http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/lisa/workshop_3.0/Lisa_Workshop_C_Users_Guide_1985.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/lisa/workshop_3.0/Lisa_Wo...), but you're right that they were a majority Pascal shop until they shifted to C++ around when System 7 came out.
        pjmlp 1y ago
        It did, as userspace tooling for customers, the system was written in a mix of Assembly and Clascal, Object Pascal predecessor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clascal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clascal
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- baranul 1y ago
  People were not laughing at Turbo Pascal or Delphi when they came out, and they dominated for many years. Delphi/Object Pascal is still taught in the schools of many countries. There are people who want everyone to forget Delphi/Object Pascal and they wish it was dead. But what they wish for and reality are two different things. Delphi still makes money, otherwise they wouldn't sell it.

massung 1y ago

By that logic, if modern LLMs existed in the 80s, you’d have never learned Haskell, Ocaml, Rust, Go, Erlang, … and all the cool concepts and ideas that came with them. You’d still be programming Basic and Fortran, simply because that’s all the models knew. AI may be helpful at times, but to limit one’s self to only the knowledge and experience they have is… short sighted at best.

coliveira 1y ago
Unfortunately this is what AI is leading to. People will stop learning new languages and companies will stop developing new ones because AI is now supposed to write code.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  I agree, I envison that we will reach a state where the tooling will be generating executables directly. As next step of low code/no code tooling, the agent will do the actions for us. We are already seeing this on SaaS offerings.
3036e4 1y ago
I tried to make some LLMs write (GW-)BASIC and they failed miserably. Maybe they were only trained on some modern BASIC that doesn't look like BASIC at all? Could not convince them to use line numbers at all. Maybe with a lot of context they could do it, but my prompts did not work, even making I clear I wanted line numbers. (Free)Pascal seems to work great though. I think enough of that is in training data that it can be used as well as any language. There isn't much special to consider to get it right. It is not like figuring out how to do Rust or C++.
add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
People wanting shortcuts and to do less work/thinking is about to become the major force in society over the next generation.
- azinman2 1y ago

johnisgood 1y ago

Feed it documentation and example code and given sufficient data of these, it will do just fine with obscure languages. I have tried it with programming languages as obscure as Odin, for example, and it worked nicely. It is way more awful writing Forth, for one. YMMV.

werdnapk 1y ago

Reinforces the A in AI... "artificial" intelligence. Actual intelligence could pick up a new language no problem.

yndoendo 1y ago

Programming languages are tools in a toolbox. Use the proper tool for the job instead of always picking up the hammer. It takes time to train and use a new tool. That applies to LLM and humans. Would you use the same drill to hang drywall and core through a concrete floor?