I retired a few years ago and it's very clear that was a good thing.
I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
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Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
People have been saying this for multiple years in a row now.
And it has been getting more true for years in a row.
Disagree entirely.
If you state “in 6 months AI will not require that much knowledge to be effective” every year and it hasn’t happened yet then every time it has been stated has been false up to this point.
In 6 months we can come back to this thread and determine the truth value for the premise. I would guess it will be false as it has been historically so far.
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a part of it, but I also feel like a Luddite (the historical meaning, not the derogatory slang). I do use these tools, clearly see their potential, and know full well where this is going: capital is devaluing labor. My skills will become worthless. Maybe GP is right that at first only skilled developers can wield them to full effect, but it's obviously not going to stop there. If I could destroy these things…
> If I could destroy these things - as the Luddites tried - I would do so, but that's obviously impossible. Certainly, you must realize how much worse life would be for all of us had the Luddites succeeded.
Sure, but would it have been better or worse for the Luddites?
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#394I'm 61 (retired when I was 57).
I too began with BASIC (but closer to 1980). Although I wrote and published games for the Macintosh for a number of years as I finished up college, my professional career (in the traditional sense) began when I was hired by Apple in 1995 and relocated to the Bay Area.
Yeah, what started out as a great just got worse and worse as time went on.
I suspect though that to a large degree this reflects both the growing complexity of the OS over that time as well as the importance of software in general as it became more critical to people's lives.
Already, even in 1984 when it was first introduced, the Mac had a rich graphics library you would not want to have to implement yourself. (Although famously of course a few apps like Photoshop nonetheless did just that—leaning on the Mac simply for a final call to CopyBits() to display pixels from Adobe's buffer to the screen.)
You kind of have to accept abstraction when networking, multiple cores, multiple processes become integral to the machine. I guess I always understood that and did not feel too put out by it. If anything a good framework was somewhat of a relief—someone else's problem, ha ha. (And truly a beautiful API is just that: a beautiful thing. I enjoy working well constructed frameworks.)
But the latter issue, the increasing dominance of software on our lives is what I think contributed more to poisoning the well. Letting the inmates run the asylum more or less describes the way engineering worked when I began at Apple in 1995. We loved it that way. (Say what you want about that kind of bottom-up culture of that era, but our "users" were generally nerds just like us—we knew, or thought we knew anyway, better than marketing what the customer wanted and we pursued it.)
Agile development, unit tests, code reviews… all these weird things began to creep in and get in the way of coding. Worse, they felt like busywork meant simply to give management a sense of control… or some metric for progress.
"What is our code coverage for unit test?" a manager might ask. "90%," comes the reply from engineering. "I want to see 95% coverage by next month," comes the marching orders. Whatever.
I confess I am happy to have now left that arena behind. I still code in my retirement but it's back to those cowboy-programmer days around this house.
Yee haw!
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#395I'm the exact age as the author and this post could have been written by me (if I could write). It echoes my story and sentiment exactly right down to cutting my literal baby teeth on a rubber key ZX Spectrum. The anxiety I have that the author might not be explicitly stating is that as we look for places we add genuine value in the crevices of frontier models' shortcomings those crevices are getting more narrow by t…
> this post could have been written by me (if I could write) This post was written by AI
English is my second language so I'm not well tuned to picking up on the phrases that expose writing as AI generated. Even so it doesn't really change the sentiment being conveyed nor the fact that it's better writing than I could muster.
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me it's both - I mourn the loss of my craft ( and my identity ) but I'm also enjoying the "magic". Last night I was thinking about this "xswarm" screen saver I had in 1992 on my DEC Ultrix workstation. I googled for the C source code and found it. I asked Claude to convert it to Java, which it did in a few seconds. I compiled and ran it, and there it was again, like magic
In case anyone else was curious about the screensaver mentioned, I couldn't find any screenshots so just got Claude to cook up an HTML port: https://refset.github.io/xgrav-canvas-js/xgrav.html
It's this one with bees and a wasp
https://sources.debian.org/src/xlockmore/4.12-4/modes/swarm....
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
but are employers going to be fine with that?
That remains to be seen. As long as the work gets done... Don't ask, don't tell.
These are the same employers that mandate return to office for distributed teams and micro-manage every access of our work. I think we know how its going to play out.
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#398[dead]
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#399[dead]
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#400Some farmers probably lamented the rise of machines because they feared their strength would no longer be needed in the fields. These farmers were no doubt more concerned with their own usefulness as laborers than in the goals of the farm: to produce food.
If you program as labor, consider what you might build with no boss. You’re better equipped to start your own farm than you think.