Even if you want to use an LLM (which you probably shouldn't, but it's your life), you best know how to program if you want to make anything good. They suck at programming, and need a human to guide them.
Learning to code is still worthwhile
71–80 of 326 posts
Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile
#72With everyday bringing new developments in the world, a lot of skills that used to be in demand are being replaced with new age tools. This has been the case in many industries and its evolving. The last 6 years have reshaped the world as we know it very aggressively and the best we can do is flow and adapt to the new times
Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile
#73As a professional programmer entering the final third of an enjoyable career, I would now place "learning to code" in the same category as "making a living as a poet." As in, it's truly enjoyable art and some people appreciate it, but you'd better plan for a day job. Senior people who already know how to code are doing OKish for now, from the data I've seen, but the job is increasingly babysitting models like they we…
> As a professional programmer entering the final third of an enjoyable career, I would now place "learning to code" in the same category as "making a living as a poet." As in, it's truly enjoyable art and some people appreciate it, but you'd better plan for a day job.
Not wrong. Probably.
I'm reminded of an old friend from long ago. She was an early music major at Harvard, and graduated with a MFA. She was very good. She read and wrote Latin and Greek, could compose and play music using medieval notations, and published a book on early needlepoint.
She never obtained an academic appointment. She never found a job that needed those skills. She died alone a few years ago.
That may be the fate of many programmers.
Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile
#74The era of LLMs is similar to when Magic was discovered in the 1400s. The layperson may be able to get ahold of a spellbook, but without Understanding it comes with high risk of turning your niece into a frog. Whereas Wizards can cast increasingly powerful spells that build on each other, and make Art.
I can’t tell if you’re serious or not.
I think they're being silly, but it's a pretty common trope: comparing the weird, sometimes highly idiosyncratic syntactical constructs of programming languages to a series of magical incantations.
Lev Grossman wrote an entire book that hinged on this idea of melding magic with technology.
Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile
#75Coding is easy. It's the programming that's hard.
I'm glad I'm a programmer and not just a coder. Just like Hemingway was a writer and not just a stenographer or typist.
Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile
#76It's worth learning to harvest with a scythe because it's cheap, good exercise, and has no mechanical parts to fail.
The issue isn't whether it's worth learning something in a personal development sense, it's whether it's worth going into massive student loan debt to pursue a career path that was once seen as a ticket to a comfy office job. LLMs probably won't replace top performing software engineers. Will they replace the mediocre cog-in-the-machine coders that most people become? In 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? That's what has college students worrying about whether it's "worth it".
Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile
#77As a professional programmer entering the final third of an enjoyable career, I would now place "learning to code" in the same category as "making a living as a poet." As in, it's truly enjoyable art and some people appreciate it, but you'd better plan for a day job. Senior people who already know how to code are doing OKish for now, from the data I've seen, but the job is increasingly babysitting models like they we…
The babysitting work would still be impossible if you didn't actually know how to code.
Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile
#78Note that every single person telling you to not learn to code currently knows how to code, often at an expert level, and is therefore capable of reasoning about code.
I learned to build such useless things as operating systems, databases and neural nets from scratch. That knowledge is foundational to my ability today to lead technical teams effectively, even in the era of copilot.
I would absolutely not hire an engineer who could not code. Don't get me wrong, I don't need code monkeys any more than I need assembly experts.
I need engineers who have experience building, tuning and maintaining complex software.
Someone who can't code can't crack open what they're working on and reason about it in a meaningful way. That's a huge liability. Also like... they just haven't ever done that work before. I don't even know if they're going to be capable of it.
I did some consulting a few years ago to convert startup codebases from Ruby on Rails to something that "would scale". Some of the projects I opened up were beyond comical. Millions and millions of dollars of investor capital burned torturing cut-rate junior engineers to get them to make a product-shaped solutions that could not be maintained, could not be scaled, could not be modified without everything breaking... entire teams of cheerful idiots who were replaceable with a single capable senior engineer who knew what they were actually doing. It was just tragic. Literal futures burned up as friction with reality, because neither the founder nor their engineers could write actual code to build clean, scalable systems without tripping over their own feet.
You're signing future engineers up to be those utterly lackluster juniors for the rest of their lives. Stay in school kids. Learn to code.
Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile
#79I mean, iteration and interaction builds your understanding which verifies and validates what you built. Relying on agents without formal validation is like saying a tree fell in the forest
Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Abstractions are one thing, not putting any effort into learning is another. People worry about the latter.
Exactly. I'm not saying that you should go back to code in assembly. But, come on, you can surely dedicate 30 minutes of your time to read how a CPU works... Just have curiosity would be my advice
At the expense of what, though? That's 30 minutes not spent learning about the business, or talking to customers, or to your kids. Or watching the World
Cup. Or reading Hacker News.