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Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

cekrem.github.io

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Re: Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

#31

Post by cjs_ac »

1123581321 wrote: post #18
cjs_ac wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As bad as Merriam-Webster is, you might notice that 'characterised by habitual and unthinking behaviour' is the fourth , i.e. , least common, definition offered, not the first.

Somehow I knew you would keep digging. :) It’s not marked as an archaic so any of them are valid. Context tells the reader which is being used.

> Somehow I knew you would keep digging. :)

I was the teacher who thought words were fun. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be acceptable any more. :(

> Context tells the reader which is being used.

That's the thing: if you read the CEO's post on its own, with both meanings in mind, it's not clear (at least to me) which is intended.

Re: Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

#32

Post by aaronbaugher »

svieira wrote: post #29
strangescript wrote: post #12

Yeah, anytime I am about to do some long multiplication, I start reaching for my calculator and stop, "no, you will go to the multiplication gym, and do this by hand, need to stay sharp"

I am not sure if you are serious, but I literally DO this, not just for multiplication, but for lots of automatable things.

Same here. I stopped writing in cursive in high school and completely lost the ability, and it was difficult to learn again as an adult when I wanted to. I don't want to lose basic skills like multiplication, and exercising them occasionally prevents that.

Re: Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

#33

Post by rout39574 »

cjs_ac wrote: post #6
Handprint4469 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we were required to engage in 'reflexive practice', meaning at the end of the school day, we were expected to sit down and think about - reflect - on what had happened that day. That is _reflective_ practice (which involves reflection). Reflexive otoh comes from 'reflex', which does suggest unthinking automaticity.

No, reflexive and reflective are synonyms; they are alternative forms of adjectives derived from the Latin verb flecto , flectere , flexi , flexum (note that both English spellings are present in the principal parts).

It's been a LONG time since my latin. But doesn't the active vs. passive capture the distinction we're talking about in English quite well?

A reflexive action is taken passively, without thought.

A reflective action is taken actively, with careful thought.

Re: Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

#34

Post by canes123456 »

bobbyraduloff wrote: post #25
strangescript wrote: post #12

Yeah, anytime I am about to do some long multiplication, I start reaching for my calculator and stop, "no, you will go to the multiplication gym, and do this by hand, need to stay sharp"

This is an absolutely false equivalency. There’s no decision making, design consideration, architecture, real problem solving, etc. when doing long multiplication.

You still need to do the decision making, design, architecture when using AI. AI is still more like a enthusiastic junior engineer. It will mindless start trying to solve a problem, copy in bad code, often makes mistakes, etc. You're still responsible for the hard problems and finding the issues. You are more of an senior/lead engineer who is doing as much thinking but not that much of the actual typing.

The question in my mind is if you need to become less productive to keep your thinking skills sharp. Do we need to separate the work from the "gym". We have times when we are using AI heavily to be as productive as possible. Then we have other times where we don't use it all to keep us sharp.

Is this necessary or are we being old fashion? I lean more towards this being necessary but if I grew up with AI, I might look at not using it as trying to write a web app in assembly. Yes, I learned it in college but there no reason to keep using it.

Re: Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

#35

Post by mvieira38 »

rco8786 wrote: post #20
ericyd wrote: post #17

I also appreciate the craft of coding. My suspicion is that eventually it just won't be a thing anymore, even though such a future is not my preference. Not that humans will be completely removed from coding, but writing every line yourself will just be incredibly uncommon and not industry standard. I'm not good at predicting, this is just where my gut is right now.

This is a similar reaction folks had to autocomplete/intellisense when it came out also. "What you just press tab and get all the possible options. Psh, how about reading the docs like the rest of us did?". I think AI is a pretty big step function up in terms of the computer's capability to predict the code you want - but at the end of the day we'll still be writing code (I think. I hope).

Overreliance on intellisense does worsen your abilities, though, especially when dealing with complex packages and APIs. So does stack overflow. In my domain of data science and finance, it is VERY noticeable when someone doesn't actually understand how Pandas and Numpy work, for example, and how to write good vectorized solutions to their problems

Re: Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

#36

Post by gorjusborg »

cjs_ac wrote: post #31
1123581321 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somehow I knew you would keep digging. :) It’s not marked as an archaic so any of them are valid. Context tells the reader which is being used.

> Somehow I knew you would keep digging. :) I was the teacher who thought words were fun. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be acceptable any more. :( > Context tells the reader which is being used. That's the thing: if you read the CEO's post on its own, with both meanings in mind, it's not clear (at least to me) which is intended.

Words and civil debate seeking truth are fun!

The following behavior is not.

> No, reflexive and reflective are synonyms; ...

> I was the teacher who thought words were fun. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be acceptable any more. :(

Re: Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

#37

Post by canes123456 »

TheChaplain wrote: post #9

I like the article. At the same time, as AI takes over the actual coding practice more and more, I find the situation with multiple programming languages a waste of resources. If AI could generate binaries, web assembly directly, or even some "AI specific bytecode" then we could skip the steps in the middle and save a ton of energy.

So we just trust what AI says it does. What could go wrong, lol

Re: Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

#38

Post by pyfon »

ericyd wrote: post #17

I also appreciate the craft of coding. My suspicion is that eventually it just won't be a thing anymore, even though such a future is not my preference. Not that humans will be completely removed from coding, but writing every line yourself will just be incredibly uncommon and not industry standard. I'm not good at predicting, this is just where my gut is right now.

This sort if makes me want to learn Lisp. Maybe if every line packs a lot of punch and you need fewer of them, you can do things AI can't do yet. I think AI would struggle with Lisp since in Lisp, you engineer a language for the task. AI tends to be good on languages it is trained on. For now!

Re: Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

#40

Post by mvieira38 »

svieira wrote: post #29
strangescript wrote: post #12

Yeah, anytime I am about to do some long multiplication, I start reaching for my calculator and stop, "no, you will go to the multiplication gym, and do this by hand, need to stay sharp"

I am not sure if you are serious, but I literally DO this, not just for multiplication, but for lots of automatable things.

Love your surname dude (also your religion). AMDG
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