3 ms·

There is no subtext to bigstrat2003's argument, other than "I'm wrong, and I don't care." If you give persistent, repeatable instructions to a computer, you ar

There is no subtext to bigstrat2003's argument, other than "I'm wrong, and I don't care." If you give persistent, repeatable instructions to a computer, you are programming it. If you disagree, you are gatekeeping. It's that simple. The most popular programming languages in 2030 will, in fact, be English and Mandarin. Deal with it and get over it. ---------------- Edit, to bcrosby95: Look up the etymology of the word 'computer'. It didn't originally have anything to do with hardware. The first computers were people, who were told what to do ("programmed") without necessarily knowing what they were working on in a big-picture sense.

deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
27183 1mo ago
> The most popular programming languages in 2030 will, in fact, be English and Mandarin. Deal with it and get over it. What are you willing to bet?
- CamperBob2 1mo ago
  I'm game. Say $1000, donated to a charity of the winner's choice? How do you want to set the bet up, and how do you think it should be decided? To be precise: I will bet that high-level programming languages won't be any less popular as a whole, but the vast majority of code will be written by AI rather than humans, working from specs written in natural language or something very close to it. What we call "source code" today will be thought of as "object code" by 2030. Something that occasionally needs to be inspected by humans, but rarely authored directly. Anyone not writing code this way had better be doing it as a hobby, because almost no one will pay for it.
  - MichaelNolan 1mo ago
    Seems like a case for https://longbets.org/ https://longbets.org/ You and the other poster just need to find some agreeable benchmark so you can decide who won.
    - CamperBob2 1mo ago
      Good idea, I know they've been around for a while. I just signed up under the same username in case 27183 is interested.
    - 27183 1mo ago
      > You and the other poster just need to find some agreeable benchmark so you can decide who won. That is the hard part. I'm not sure the usage numbers we'd need to decide the outcome are public now, and I can't predict ~4yr out whether any currently available metric will continue to be available. Stack Overflow's popular language thing has been going for a while, that will probably still exist (if SO does) but do we have any reliable metrics to tell us what fraction of code is AI generated?
      - CamperBob2 1mo ago
        I think the outcome will be very obvious when the the time comes to settle the bet, but I agree that it's not easy to write those terms today. But speaking of Stack Overflow, that's a good point to examine more closely. Simply looking at Stack Overflow's usage trend [1] should have been a strong clue that a seismic shift was under way. A couple of things could be responsible for it, though: 1) Stack Overflow's movers and shakers have finally assholed themselves into irrelevance. That's possible, and it could potentially explain the secular decline that began around 2015. But it doesn't explain the rate of descent since 2023, given that the core rules haven't changed for years. It also doesn't explain the meteoric rise between 2008-2014. What they were doing clearly worked, right up until it didn't. 2) AI is now answering questions that would previously have been posted to SO. That's the conventional argument. Hard to dispute it. And it leads to... 3) Stack Overflow has not failed its mission, but fulfilled it: most of the code that will ever need to be written already has been. That's an argument I've never seen anyone else propose, likely because it's a really stupid argument that's been made many times before. I think it's true this time, though, at least until genuinely-new hardware paradigms come along. I think it's a big reason why AI will be doing our jobs for us going forward. Programming is a robot's job now. 3a) As a corollary not related to the SO question, I think the math community is starting to wake up to a similar realization: we have all the math we need. Or, rather, we have all the math we can comprehend. The low-hanging fruit is all gone. Mochizuki's work, which requires a large part of multiple peoples' careers to prove or refute, is an example of that phenomenon. Leading mathematicians are coming to recognize that their best shot at contributing to progress in math is to work on AI. The groundwork has been laid, and now we need to find better ways to reuse and recycle what we have. That's how AI will help us reach the next level. It's just crazy to think that our industry will be recognizable in 3-5 more years. 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1viznwk/stack_overflow_has_gone_from_a_peak_of_207k/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1viz...
  - WD-42 1mo ago
    These arguments are so silly. Other person probably doesn’t like the idea that LLMs will replace hard earned skills. On the flip side, I bet you’ve seen your skills atrophy at an alarming rate and are trying to justify it. Both sides come from fear. Just relax and take things as they come. Whatever happens happens.
    - 27183 1mo ago
      > Both sides come from fear. Maybe. I'll have to think about that one. It doesn't feel like fear to me, but that could be some kind of coping mechanism. From where I sit, I don't believe I fear this AI stuff because I don't really see what all the fuss is about. I don't think I'll be replaced by Claude anytime soon, because fundamentally language models cannot do the things necessary to compete with me. They can generate large amounts of relatively mediocre code quickly, but that's not really what anyone expects of me in the workplace. Instead, what I do is I think deeply and understand things. And I refine my understanding of those things. And eventually, I have some insight that proves extremely valuable to my employer. Or sometimes not! But on balance it tends to work out swimmingly in their favor. This may sometimes involve writing lots of code, sometimes it involves writing very tiny amounts of code. Sometimes it involves simply deleting code. But the code part of that job is really minimal. It's all the other things--developing understanding, having insights, thinking really hard, making connections, communicating--that are valuable. Banging out code was never a big deal. I'm good at writing clear, correct code and I believe I can do it better than an LLM, if not faster. But that never mattered very much, what actually matters is learning and adapting. I'll be scared when someone makes an "AI" that can do that competitively, but I'm not worried this will happen anytime soon. So the premises of this "LLM crisis" seem deluded to me. The people saying "everyone will be using an LLM all day every day for their job" seem to have no idea what jobs are like or what LLMs are (in)capable of. The people talking about AI paperclip apocalypses seem like they're having a really bad drug trip. The stock market bros and VCs throwing money as hard as they can after whimsical sci-fi fantasies seem like they've gone completely batshit insane. Meanwhile managers are forcing workers to use LLMs for everything, for no clear reason, and push them into products where it does nothing good. So therefore every little spineless corporate toady is clambering on top of the other little spineless corporate toadies to show big mr manager what a good AI boy they are. It seems like y'all have lost your entire minds because the computer does words now. It's not fear. It's disgust. I'm disgusted by all of this.
  - deleted 1mo ago
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JoshTriplett 1mo ago
There is subtext to my argument, namely that you're the one standing in front of the bus, and trying to pull the rest of us in front of the bus, while shouting at the people standing safely out of the road. I'll continue to reject the replacement of humanity. (That doesn't mean remaining ignorant of AI as a technology. It means rejecting the idea that we should be thrilled to be replaced by AI.)
asdff 1mo ago
Still getting technical interviews in pure python, specifying you don't use LLM, in late 2026. 4 years now from me having to learn mandarin I guess...
Plont 1mo ago
LLMs do not produce repeatable results, by their nature. Two people can give the exact same prompt to the exact same LLM and get different results. It's not a straightforward 1 + 1 always equals 2 process. This is like telling someone else to code something for you. You relinquish control of all the details. Calling it gatekeeping is just laughable. That's like saying it's gatekeeping to say that the painter painted their painting, and that the person who commissioned the painting did not paint it. It's wholely absurd. Anybody can pick up a book and learn to actually code themselves. Or you can use an LLM to try to make things without bothering with that. But even if the LLM worked perfectly, pretending these are the same thing is silly. The history of the word computer is obviously irrelevant. Words change, it turns out.
- CamperBob2 1mo ago
  LLMs do not produce repeatable results, by their nature. Neither do humans. Two people can give the exact same prompt to the exact same LLM and get different results. No one cares. This is like telling someone else to code something for you. Exactly.
- pastel8739 1mo ago
  It isn’t really by their nature that they don’t give repeatable results, right? They’re just a bunch of math, but they perform better with randomness injected so we choose do to so. (I’ve heard about some GPU compute nuance meaning that even without randomness injected they still wouldn’t quite be deterministic, but that’s also not core to their nature)

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]

27183 1mo ago

> The most popular programming languages in 2030 will, in fact, be English and Mandarin. Deal with it and get over it. What are you willing to bet?

CamperBob2 1mo ago
I'm game. Say $1000, donated to a charity of the winner's choice? How do you want to set the bet up, and how do you think it should be decided? To be precise: I will bet that high-level programming languages won't be any less popular as a whole, but the vast majority of code will be written by AI rather than humans, working from specs written in natural language or something very close to it. What we call "source code" today will be thought of as "object code" by 2030. Something that occasionally needs to be inspected by humans, but rarely authored directly. Anyone not writing code this way had better be doing it as a hobby, because almost no one will pay for it.
- MichaelNolan 1mo ago
  Seems like a case for https://longbets.org/ https://longbets.org/ You and the other poster just need to find some agreeable benchmark so you can decide who won.
  - CamperBob2 1mo ago
    Good idea, I know they've been around for a while. I just signed up under the same username in case 27183 is interested.
  - 27183 1mo ago
    > You and the other poster just need to find some agreeable benchmark so you can decide who won. That is the hard part. I'm not sure the usage numbers we'd need to decide the outcome are public now, and I can't predict ~4yr out whether any currently available metric will continue to be available. Stack Overflow's popular language thing has been going for a while, that will probably still exist (if SO does) but do we have any reliable metrics to tell us what fraction of code is AI generated?
    - CamperBob2 1mo ago
      I think the outcome will be very obvious when the the time comes to settle the bet, but I agree that it's not easy to write those terms today. But speaking of Stack Overflow, that's a good point to examine more closely. Simply looking at Stack Overflow's usage trend [1] should have been a strong clue that a seismic shift was under way. A couple of things could be responsible for it, though: 1) Stack Overflow's movers and shakers have finally assholed themselves into irrelevance. That's possible, and it could potentially explain the secular decline that began around 2015. But it doesn't explain the rate of descent since 2023, given that the core rules haven't changed for years. It also doesn't explain the meteoric rise between 2008-2014. What they were doing clearly worked, right up until it didn't. 2) AI is now answering questions that would previously have been posted to SO. That's the conventional argument. Hard to dispute it. And it leads to... 3) Stack Overflow has not failed its mission, but fulfilled it: most of the code that will ever need to be written already has been. That's an argument I've never seen anyone else propose, likely because it's a really stupid argument that's been made many times before. I think it's true this time, though, at least until genuinely-new hardware paradigms come along. I think it's a big reason why AI will be doing our jobs for us going forward. Programming is a robot's job now. 3a) As a corollary not related to the SO question, I think the math community is starting to wake up to a similar realization: we have all the math we need. Or, rather, we have all the math we can comprehend. The low-hanging fruit is all gone. Mochizuki's work, which requires a large part of multiple peoples' careers to prove or refute, is an example of that phenomenon. Leading mathematicians are coming to recognize that their best shot at contributing to progress in math is to work on AI. The groundwork has been laid, and now we need to find better ways to reuse and recycle what we have. That's how AI will help us reach the next level. It's just crazy to think that our industry will be recognizable in 3-5 more years. 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1viznwk/stack_overflow_has_gone_from_a_peak_of_207k/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1viz...
- WD-42 1mo ago
  These arguments are so silly. Other person probably doesn’t like the idea that LLMs will replace hard earned skills. On the flip side, I bet you’ve seen your skills atrophy at an alarming rate and are trying to justify it. Both sides come from fear. Just relax and take things as they come. Whatever happens happens.
  - 27183 1mo ago
    > Both sides come from fear. Maybe. I'll have to think about that one. It doesn't feel like fear to me, but that could be some kind of coping mechanism. From where I sit, I don't believe I fear this AI stuff because I don't really see what all the fuss is about. I don't think I'll be replaced by Claude anytime soon, because fundamentally language models cannot do the things necessary to compete with me. They can generate large amounts of relatively mediocre code quickly, but that's not really what anyone expects of me in the workplace. Instead, what I do is I think deeply and understand things. And I refine my understanding of those things. And eventually, I have some insight that proves extremely valuable to my employer. Or sometimes not! But on balance it tends to work out swimmingly in their favor. This may sometimes involve writing lots of code, sometimes it involves writing very tiny amounts of code. Sometimes it involves simply deleting code. But the code part of that job is really minimal. It's all the other things--developing understanding, having insights, thinking really hard, making connections, communicating--that are valuable. Banging out code was never a big deal. I'm good at writing clear, correct code and I believe I can do it better than an LLM, if not faster. But that never mattered very much, what actually matters is learning and adapting. I'll be scared when someone makes an "AI" that can do that competitively, but I'm not worried this will happen anytime soon. So the premises of this "LLM crisis" seem deluded to me. The people saying "everyone will be using an LLM all day every day for their job" seem to have no idea what jobs are like or what LLMs are (in)capable of. The people talking about AI paperclip apocalypses seem like they're having a really bad drug trip. The stock market bros and VCs throwing money as hard as they can after whimsical sci-fi fantasies seem like they've gone completely batshit insane. Meanwhile managers are forcing workers to use LLMs for everything, for no clear reason, and push them into products where it does nothing good. So therefore every little spineless corporate toady is clambering on top of the other little spineless corporate toadies to show big mr manager what a good AI boy they are. It seems like y'all have lost your entire minds because the computer does words now. It's not fear. It's disgust. I'm disgusted by all of this.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]

JoshTriplett 1mo ago

There is subtext to my argument, namely that you're the one standing in front of the bus, and trying to pull the rest of us in front of the bus, while shouting at the people standing safely out of the road. I'll continue to reject the replacement of humanity. (That doesn't mean remaining ignorant of AI as a technology. It means rejecting the idea that we should be thrilled to be replaced by AI.)

asdff 1mo ago

Still getting technical interviews in pure python, specifying you don't use LLM, in late 2026. 4 years now from me having to learn mandarin I guess...

Plont 1mo ago

LLMs do not produce repeatable results, by their nature. Two people can give the exact same prompt to the exact same LLM and get different results. It's not a straightforward 1 + 1 always equals 2 process. This is like telling someone else to code something for you. You relinquish control of all the details. Calling it gatekeeping is just laughable. That's like saying it's gatekeeping to say that the painter painted their painting, and that the person who commissioned the painting did not paint it. It's wholely absurd. Anybody can pick up a book and learn to actually code themselves. Or you can use an LLM to try to make things without bothering with that. But even if the LLM worked perfectly, pretending these are the same thing is silly. The history of the word computer is obviously irrelevant. Words change, it turns out.

CamperBob2 1mo ago
LLMs do not produce repeatable results, by their nature. Neither do humans. Two people can give the exact same prompt to the exact same LLM and get different results. No one cares. This is like telling someone else to code something for you. Exactly.
pastel8739 1mo ago
It isn’t really by their nature that they don’t give repeatable results, right? They’re just a bunch of math, but they perform better with randomness injected so we choose do to so. (I’ve heard about some GPU compute nuance meaning that even without randomness injected they still wouldn’t quite be deterministic, but that’s also not core to their nature)