5 ms·

I am old enough to have heard this before. C makes you a bad programmer. Real men code in assembler. IDEs make you a bad programmer. Real men code in a text e

I am old enough to have heard this before. C makes you a bad programmer. Real men code in assembler. IDEs make you a bad programmer. Real men code in a text editor. Intellisense / autocomplete makes you a bad programmer. Real men RTFM. Round and round we go...

HPsquared 11mo ago
I'll always remember a lab we had in university where we hand-wrote machine code to do blinkenlights, and used an array of toggle switches to enter each byte into memory by hand.
monkaiju 11mo ago
Those are all syntactic changes, AI attempts to be semantic, totally different.
- CharlesW 11mo ago
  The examples are semantic shifts. Assembler → C wasn't just a syntax swap (functions are semantic units, types are meaning, compilation is optimization reasoning, etc.). "Rename this symbol safely across a project" is a semantic transformation. And of course, autocomplete is semantic. AI represents a difference in degree, but not kind. Like the examples cited by the parent, AI further moves us from lower-level semantics to higher-level semantics.
  - monkaiju 11mo ago
    Fair enough that semantic might not be the best word, but the point is that none of those tools attempt to actually do anything involving _understanding_, thats all for the human. Autocomplete is based on heuristics that are replicable given the same inputs, LLM-based AI is not. Your instructions are not "compiled" like in languages, they're mathsticated
saubeidl 11mo ago
All of this is true, but all of the examples that came before were deterministic, so once you understood the abstraction, you still understood the whole thing. AI is different.
mywittyname 11mo ago
My opinion is that these are not analogous. Programming takes practice. And if all of your code is generated via LLM, then you're not getting any practice. It's the same as saying using genAI will make you a bad artist. In the sense that putting hands-to-medium makes you a good artist, that is true. Unless you take deliberate steps to learn, your skills will attrophe. However, being a good programmer|artist is different from being a successful programmer|artist. GenAI can help you churn out tons of content, and if you can turn that content into income, you'll be successful. Even before LLMs, successful and capable were orthogonal features for most programmers. We had people who made millions churning out a crud website over a few months, and others that can build game engines, but are stuck in underpaid contracting roles.
- johnfn 11mo ago
  Are you not getting practice working with an LLM? Why would that not also be a skill you can practice?
  - dogma1138 11mo ago
    Those are objectively different skills tho.
    - FloorEgg 11mo ago
      In the same way that using hand tools are different skills than using power tools. Or doing bookkeeping for a small business with pencil and paper is a different skill than using spreadsheets or dedicated bookkeeping software.
  - FloorEgg 11mo ago
    25+ year programmer thats been using an agentic IDE for 9 months chiming in. Yes I absolutely am. Yes it's a skill. Some programmers I've discussed this with made up their mind before they tried it. If the programmers goal is to produce valuable software that works and is secure and easy to maintain then they will gravitate to LLM assisted programming. I'd their goal is to program software then they won't like the idea of the LLM doing it for them. To make the distinction more clear; if the carpenters goal is to produce chairs they may be inclined to use power tools, if their goal is to work with wood then they might not want to use power tools. So where people fall on this debate mostly depends on their values and priorities (wants). The thing about wants is they are almost never changed with logical arguments. Some people just want to write the code themselves. Some people also want other people to write the code themselves. I don't know why, but I know that logical arguments are unlikely to change these people's minds because our wants are so entangled in our sense of self that they exist outside of the context of pure logic, and probably for valid evolutionary beneficial reasons. To be clear, programmers working on very novel niche use cases where LLMs genuinely aren't useful have valid case of "it's not helpful to me yet", and these people are distinct from what I'm mostly referring to. If someone is open minded, tried their best to make it work, and decided it's not good enough yet, that's totally fair and unrelated to my main point.
utopman 11mo ago
This. I am mid career now. High level langages like js or python have a lot of bad design / suboptimal code... as well as some java code in many places. Some bad java code (it just needs to be a sql select in a loop) can easily perform thousand time worse than a clean python implementation of the same thing. As said above, once c was high level programing language and still is in some places. I do not code in python / go / js that much these days, but what made me a not so bad developper is my understanding of computing mechanism (why and how to use memory instead of disk, how to arange code so cpu can use it's cache efficiently...) As said in many posts, code quality even for vibe coded stuff depends more on what was prompted and how many efforts the PR diff is human readable to get maintainable and efficient softwares at the end of the day. Yet senior devs often spend more time reviewing code instead of actually writting some. Vibe coding ultimately feels the same for me at the moment. I still love to write some code by hand, but I start to feel less and less productive with this approach while at the same time feeling I don't really lost my skills to do so. I think I really feel and effectively am more efficient at delivering thing with appropriate quality level for my customers now that I have agentic coding skills in my belt.
wrs 11mo ago
AI makes you not be a programmer (at least, that seems to be the goal). So it’s a little different from those. It’s like a carpenter talking about IKEA saying “I remember when I got an electric sander, it’s the same thing”.
jerf 11mo ago
The problem I have with a lot of these "oh I've heard it all before"-type posts is that some of what you heard is true. Yes, IDEs did make for some bad programmers. Yes, scripting languages has made for some bad programmers. Yes, some other shortcuts have made for bad programmers. They haven't destroyed everyone but there definitely are sets of people who used the crutches and never got past them. And not just in a "well they never needed anything more" but worse programmers than they should or could have been.
AndyKelley 11mo ago
C doesn't make you dependent on constant Internet connectivity, charge a monthly subscription, or expose you to lawsuits from powerful companies claiming copyright over your work. IDEs don't make you dependent on constant Internet connectivity, charge a monthly subscription, or expose you to lawsuits from powerful companies claiming copyright over your work. Intellisense/autocomplete doesn't make you dependent on constant Internet connectivity, charge a monthly subscription, or expose you to lawsuits from powerful companies claiming copyright over your work.
- mjr00 11mo ago
  I get what you're saying but let's be real: 99.99999% of modern software development is done with constant internet connectivity and is effectively impossible without it. Whether that's pulling external packages or just looking up the name of an API in the standard library. Yeah, you could grep docs, or have a shelf full of "The C++ Programming Language Reference" books like we did in the 90s, but c'mon. I have some friends in the defense industry who have to develop on machines without public internet access. You know what they all do? Have a second machine set up next to them which does have internet access.
  - AndyKelley 11mo ago
    99.99999% of modern software is crap that I don't want to be forced or even peer pressured into using
- dllthomas 11mo ago
  > IDEs don't make you dependent on constant Internet connectivity, charge a monthly subscription, Sometimes they do! But not in general, yes.
nunez 11mo ago
lol all of the latter points are true though (except for it being only men, though i get how things were back in the day)
ThrowawayR2 11mo ago
> "C makes you a bad programmer. Real men code in assembler." So, who is it that supposedly said that? Not K&R (obviously). Not Niklaus Wirth. Not Stroustrup. Not even Dijkstra (Algol 60) and he loved writing acerbic remarks about how much the average developer sucked. I don't recall Ken Thompson, Fred Brooks (OS/360), Cutler, or any other OS architect having said anything like that either. Who in that era that has any kind of credibility said that? The "Real Men Don't Use Pascal" essay was a humorous shitpost that didn't reflect any kind of prevailing opinion.
jswelker 11mo ago
"Paying a guy from the Philippines to write your code and submit it under your name is just another tool no different than using an IDE!" Surely we agree that some boundary exists where it becomes absurd right? We are just quibbling over where to draw the line. I personally draw it at AI.

HPsquared 11mo ago

I'll always remember a lab we had in university where we hand-wrote machine code to do blinkenlights, and used an array of toggle switches to enter each byte into memory by hand.

monkaiju 11mo ago

Those are all syntactic changes, AI attempts to be semantic, totally different.

CharlesW 11mo ago
The examples are semantic shifts. Assembler → C wasn't just a syntax swap (functions are semantic units, types are meaning, compilation is optimization reasoning, etc.). "Rename this symbol safely across a project" is a semantic transformation. And of course, autocomplete is semantic. AI represents a difference in degree, but not kind. Like the examples cited by the parent, AI further moves us from lower-level semantics to higher-level semantics.
- monkaiju 11mo ago
  Fair enough that semantic might not be the best word, but the point is that none of those tools attempt to actually do anything involving _understanding_, thats all for the human. Autocomplete is based on heuristics that are replicable given the same inputs, LLM-based AI is not. Your instructions are not "compiled" like in languages, they're mathsticated

saubeidl 11mo ago

All of this is true, but all of the examples that came before were deterministic, so once you understood the abstraction, you still understood the whole thing. AI is different.

mywittyname 11mo ago

My opinion is that these are not analogous. Programming takes practice. And if all of your code is generated via LLM, then you're not getting any practice. It's the same as saying using genAI will make you a bad artist. In the sense that putting hands-to-medium makes you a good artist, that is true. Unless you take deliberate steps to learn, your skills will attrophe. However, being a good programmer|artist is different from being a successful programmer|artist. GenAI can help you churn out tons of content, and if you can turn that content into income, you'll be successful. Even before LLMs, successful and capable were orthogonal features for most programmers. We had people who made millions churning out a crud website over a few months, and others that can build game engines, but are stuck in underpaid contracting roles.

johnfn 11mo ago
Are you not getting practice working with an LLM? Why would that not also be a skill you can practice?
- dogma1138 11mo ago
  Those are objectively different skills tho.
  - FloorEgg 11mo ago
    In the same way that using hand tools are different skills than using power tools. Or doing bookkeeping for a small business with pencil and paper is a different skill than using spreadsheets or dedicated bookkeeping software.
- FloorEgg 11mo ago
  25+ year programmer thats been using an agentic IDE for 9 months chiming in. Yes I absolutely am. Yes it's a skill. Some programmers I've discussed this with made up their mind before they tried it. If the programmers goal is to produce valuable software that works and is secure and easy to maintain then they will gravitate to LLM assisted programming. I'd their goal is to program software then they won't like the idea of the LLM doing it for them. To make the distinction more clear; if the carpenters goal is to produce chairs they may be inclined to use power tools, if their goal is to work with wood then they might not want to use power tools. So where people fall on this debate mostly depends on their values and priorities (wants). The thing about wants is they are almost never changed with logical arguments. Some people just want to write the code themselves. Some people also want other people to write the code themselves. I don't know why, but I know that logical arguments are unlikely to change these people's minds because our wants are so entangled in our sense of self that they exist outside of the context of pure logic, and probably for valid evolutionary beneficial reasons. To be clear, programmers working on very novel niche use cases where LLMs genuinely aren't useful have valid case of "it's not helpful to me yet", and these people are distinct from what I'm mostly referring to. If someone is open minded, tried their best to make it work, and decided it's not good enough yet, that's totally fair and unrelated to my main point.

utopman 11mo ago

This. I am mid career now. High level langages like js or python have a lot of bad design / suboptimal code... as well as some java code in many places. Some bad java code (it just needs to be a sql select in a loop) can easily perform thousand time worse than a clean python implementation of the same thing. As said above, once c was high level programing language and still is in some places. I do not code in python / go / js that much these days, but what made me a not so bad developper is my understanding of computing mechanism (why and how to use memory instead of disk, how to arange code so cpu can use it's cache efficiently...) As said in many posts, code quality even for vibe coded stuff depends more on what was prompted and how many efforts the PR diff is human readable to get maintainable and efficient softwares at the end of the day. Yet senior devs often spend more time reviewing code instead of actually writting some. Vibe coding ultimately feels the same for me at the moment. I still love to write some code by hand, but I start to feel less and less productive with this approach while at the same time feeling I don't really lost my skills to do so. I think I really feel and effectively am more efficient at delivering thing with appropriate quality level for my customers now that I have agentic coding skills in my belt.

wrs 11mo ago

AI makes you not be a programmer (at least, that seems to be the goal). So it’s a little different from those. It’s like a carpenter talking about IKEA saying “I remember when I got an electric sander, it’s the same thing”.

jerf 11mo ago

The problem I have with a lot of these "oh I've heard it all before"-type posts is that some of what you heard is true. Yes, IDEs did make for some bad programmers. Yes, scripting languages has made for some bad programmers. Yes, some other shortcuts have made for bad programmers. They haven't destroyed everyone but there definitely are sets of people who used the crutches and never got past them. And not just in a "well they never needed anything more" but worse programmers than they should or could have been.

AndyKelley 11mo ago

C doesn't make you dependent on constant Internet connectivity, charge a monthly subscription, or expose you to lawsuits from powerful companies claiming copyright over your work. IDEs don't make you dependent on constant Internet connectivity, charge a monthly subscription, or expose you to lawsuits from powerful companies claiming copyright over your work. Intellisense/autocomplete doesn't make you dependent on constant Internet connectivity, charge a monthly subscription, or expose you to lawsuits from powerful companies claiming copyright over your work.

mjr00 11mo ago
I get what you're saying but let's be real: 99.99999% of modern software development is done with constant internet connectivity and is effectively impossible without it. Whether that's pulling external packages or just looking up the name of an API in the standard library. Yeah, you could grep docs, or have a shelf full of "The C++ Programming Language Reference" books like we did in the 90s, but c'mon. I have some friends in the defense industry who have to develop on machines without public internet access. You know what they all do? Have a second machine set up next to them which does have internet access.
- AndyKelley 11mo ago
  99.99999% of modern software is crap that I don't want to be forced or even peer pressured into using
dllthomas 11mo ago
> IDEs don't make you dependent on constant Internet connectivity, charge a monthly subscription, Sometimes they do! But not in general, yes.

nunez 11mo ago

lol all of the latter points are true though (except for it being only men, though i get how things were back in the day)

ThrowawayR2 11mo ago

> "C makes you a bad programmer. Real men code in assembler." So, who is it that supposedly said that? Not K&R (obviously). Not Niklaus Wirth. Not Stroustrup. Not even Dijkstra (Algol 60) and he loved writing acerbic remarks about how much the average developer sucked. I don't recall Ken Thompson, Fred Brooks (OS/360), Cutler, or any other OS architect having said anything like that either. Who in that era that has any kind of credibility said that? The "Real Men Don't Use Pascal" essay was a humorous shitpost that didn't reflect any kind of prevailing opinion.

jswelker 11mo ago

"Paying a guy from the Philippines to write your code and submit it under your name is just another tool no different than using an IDE!" Surely we agree that some boundary exists where it becomes absurd right? We are just quibbling over where to draw the line. I personally draw it at AI.