Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by ericyd » Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 7:58 PM UTC

qoez wrote: post #44

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 has been happening for a long time though. No one has written every single line of a program since the 80s. Every one line of a JS function call can boil down to hundreds or thousands of asm lines. Same thing happens here with english to asm.

Ok... Edit my comment to say "writing the bulk of your business logic yourself will be incredibly uncommon."

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

#92

Post by Izkata » Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 8:07 PM UTC

cjs_ac wrote: post #16

1123581321 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They both have multiple meanings in English. The article was using reflexive this way: “ characterized by habitual and unthinking behavior.” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/reflexive Is that fair to the word given its roots, no, but that is English for you. :)

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.

Merriam-Webster uses historical order, not how common the meanings are [0], which makes more sense to me - I'm not entirely sure I've ever heard the "reflective" meaning for "reflexive". The "unthinking" meaning is definitely more common.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/help/explanatory-notes/dict-... (See "Order of Senses")

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

#93

Post by 1123581321 » Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 10:57 PM UTC

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 are fun, especially etymology! And students do respond well to enthusiasm for them, or at least appreciate it later. Thank you for that. My wife also teaches English and a foreign language so that’s a part of our life.

That said, how could you have read this and not understood the context for the definition used?! “The phrase “reflexive AI usage” is what triggered my strongest reaction. “Reflexive” suggests unthinking, automatic reliance.”

I thought it was fine to object that you liked the primary definition the most and had the strongest association with it.

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

#94

Post by lisp51 » Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 11:09 PM UTC

pyfon wrote: post #38

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!

I find Lisp particularly powerful as well. We use Clojure on a daily basis, and the guide that helped us a lot in getting started was Brave Clojure -- https://www.braveclojure.com/ -- going through it was fun and didn't take long. In my experience though LLM tools don't have much difficulty writing Lisp any more than other languages. However, when they hallucinate it's pretty bad: either spitting something completely off-mark, or mixing up params (and other hard to detect details), so that might be the struggle you're wondering about.

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

#95

Post by nunez » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 1:05 AM UTC

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"

Exactly how we've arrived at tip calculators for adults being extremely popular.

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

#96

Post by nunez » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 1:14 AM UTC

bovermyer wrote: post #49

lm28469 wrote: post #4

But then again most IT jobs are the equivalent of flipping burgers at mcdonald's, nobody's asking them to be Michelin starred chefs.

There is a lot I hate about this statement. First, the pervasive assumption that there is no skill involved in food preparation is wrong. While the floor may be higher in a kitchen operated by an executive chef, there is a noticeable difference between a badly-made Big Mac and a well-made one. Execution matters. Next, at this point "IT" is so broad as to be almost meaningless. In this discussion, we're talking about…

> First, the pervasive assumption that there is no skill involved in food preparation is wrong. While the floor may be higher in a kitchen operated by an executive chef, there is a noticeable difference between a badly-made Big Mac and a well-made one. Execution matters.

I worked fast food in high school in the 00s, like many folks here, I bet.

The line and product at a fast-food restaurant is heavily optimized. The patties used by a typical US quick-serve restaurant are designed around processes for optimal cook times per patty.

It really doesn't require much skill to assemble a burger at McDonald's these days outside of minimal training most unskilled people can pick up easily.

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

#97

Post by __mharrison__ » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 3:52 AM UTC

LgLasagnaModel wrote: post #72

DontchaKnowit wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone have good reference material on learning how to use pandas effectively and understanding the api as a whole? Any time ive had to use pandas I am shocked at how convuluted and opaque the docs are, and end up just hacking away till something wirks alright.

Is this a setup??? :) The guy two comments up wrote a great book on using pandas effectively. It’s called Effective Pandas

;)

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

#98

Post by bayindirh » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 2:06 PM UTC

skydhash wrote: post #82

bayindirh wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience, people are really wary of learning the tool they're using to code, because any editor similar to VSCode fulfills their needs. However, as you said, mastering a proper IDE is a superpower and allows much more to be done in a single window in a shorter amount of time. Also, since VSCode is everywhere, getting people off of it, or showing much capable software is a sad and moot effort, from my experi…

> Also, since VSCode is everywhere, getting people off of it, or showing much capable software is a sad and moot effort The issue is that they're not learning VS Code. They install a lot of plugins, but they're not really learning them. I've seen people that still go through the explorer to open a file.

It's not limited to VSCode. Except some hardcore Emacs/Vim circles, I don't see any people trying to understand and use the power of the tools they have at hand.

They even find configuring an editor or an IDE as wasting time, and of no use. Then, when you show how you handle some stuff, they ask "how did you do that??!??".