Im amazed they dont have a Sublime Text plugin, but "whatever".
GitHub Copilot is generally available
671–680 of 796 posts
Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available
#672I've been using the beta since last year and I love it. I think most of the people complaining about it either haven't used it, or are judging it on its most verbose guesses. That's not what I use it for mostly. For me, it's just a really, really good autocomplete. It's best for things with common patterns and APIs. But hey, they're common so I write them a lot. Boring stuff like creating a Response object, adding th…
How much time would you say it saves you per day? Ie. how much more productive does it make you?
I’m curious whether we’re talking 5% or 30%.
Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available
#673Next step: if Copilot can recognize often-used patterns, and variations in them, it should be able to autogenerate libraries that capture these patterns and make them useable via simper functions/classes.
That way it can capture code in a library instead of having thousands of developers copy/paste the same code snippets.
Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available
#674At worst, it helps me type fast by finishing my lines of code for me, as pressing `tab` is faster than typing boilerplate.
At best, it is scary in it's ability to pre-emptively suggest context-specific implementations of functions before I have even considered what I might need to do. It probably helps that I am very particular about how I name variables, which seems to help copilot infer my needs.
But at least a couple of times a day, I am blown away by it.
Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available
#675I assume that Copilot uses open source projects on GitHub to “learn” what to suggest. Some of these projects might be under, say, GPL v3. A developer uses Copilot for a commercial project and Copilot insert a complete function from a GPL v3 code into this project. Someone notices this and sues the commercial project for breaking GPL v3. Will GitHub pickup the tab?
> A developer uses Copilot for a commercial project and Copilot insert a complete function from a GPL v3 code into this project.
Honest question: can a function have a license? Ie. can a function be copyrighted?
If an MIT library and a GPL library use the same function with some minor variation and I use the function from the GPL code in my commercial project, have I infringed on someone’s copyright/license? Or would be argument be that the function in question is not copyrightable as almost the same version exists licensed under MIT?
Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available
#676I assume that Copilot uses open source projects on GitHub to “learn” what to suggest. Some of these projects might be under, say, GPL v3. A developer uses Copilot for a commercial project and Copilot insert a complete function from a GPL v3 code into this project. Someone notices this and sues the commercial project for breaking GPL v3. Will GitHub pickup the tab?
> Someone notices this and sues the commercial project for breaking GPL v3. I know what you mean, but silly nit pick since you mentioned “commercial” twice - GPL v3 does not prevent commercial use, it only requires copies to be open source. For someone to notice the project has copied code and not be inside the company, the code would (probably) have to be open source. So, this hypothetical is less likely to happen t…
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Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available
#677Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not that OP's problem is curly braces per se (they would make the error more obvious, but they wouldn't help with a missing return call), but since we're taling about them... The insistence of a lot of smart people on using whitespace for logic purposes is THE most baffling thing in the IT space. And I mean that. Why use some, oh I dont know, CHARACTER, to write down what you mean, why not instead use a NON CHARACTER…
The insistence of a lot of smart (?) people on NOT using whitespace for logic purposes is THE most baffling thing in the IT space. And I mean that. If you look at your typical C-like code, it is already whitespace-oriented, you just manually add the braces as line noise, to make it easier to write a compiler for the language (although even that may not be true). It is like using one character variable names, which -…
You see I've seen this "argument" a million times and it's always the same: braces are somehow visual noise. And that's it. No more arguments, it's just this one. And it's a very weak one, one that is largely about preferences. On the other hand, I listed 3 examples of indentations actually being in the way of the programmer, ESPECIALLY when working with other people. (Another example: Indentations are notorious for not surviving basic text communications between people, imagine sending Python code over email or god forbid something like Skype. Good luck reconstructing the code on the other side. Because indentations have logic attached to them, you can't just copypaste and let your editor take care of the formatting - like you can in ANY OTHER NORMAL C-LIKE LANGUAGE.)
Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available
#678Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available
#679Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not copying open source code. If you learn an algorithm to balance a binary tree from reading GPL code, and then go use that algorithm in your own closed-source project, with your own variables and types and context, are you breaking GPL? You're not copying the code. Just because you learned about it from reading GPL code doesn't mean that whenever you write tree balancing code from now until the end of time, al…
Copying of code needs to be very direct. Even Google copied tens of thousands of lines of code from Oracle character for character and won the case taken all the way to the Supreme Court. When Oracle made changes (even during the court proceedings), Google kept copying the code and every change Oracle made. So I doubt you’re at real legal risk with what you were proposing.
Is your argument in good faith? Seems like you know enough about the matter to destinguish an API definition from implementation. That's what that ruling was about, and you seemed to know it, yet make the comparison as if it was valid.
Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available
#680Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could it perhaps be you not coding for a living (and being lower in skill as you say) that make you think it's worth it? For me the bottleneck is seldom typing. And while Copilot can sometimes dish out some more advanced stuff, I still have to verify it and understand it. Since I can basically solve every problem I encounter day-to-day, Copilot's contribution is not that useful.
> For me the bottleneck is seldom typing This is one of my pet peeves in this field. People create whole programming languages that are "expressive", just to save typing a few dozen characters and have huge tirades against "verbose" languages that require typing a bunch of boilerplate. If typing the code is the bit that takes the longest for you in a project, stop and take a good look in the mirror. There's something…
People write languages at higher levels of abstraction not to type fewer characters but to reduce logical errors that can occur, and provide better abstractions over things.
An example here is an infinite list. It's far easier to do that in say Haskell and python, applying filters along the way using higher order and curried functions than it is to do it in say C.