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Learning to code is still worthwhile

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Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#231

Post by jhbadger »

fasterik wrote: post #205
taybin wrote: post #120

> Code is a beautiful form of creative expression, as rich as literature or music I think this is overstating it and makes me wonder how familiar the author is with literature and music. Most programming is closer to plumbing. We come in, gripe about the guy who did the prior job, and solve a puzzle with some unique constraints. The reason LLMs are good at coding is because with coding we want boring, banal code.

I don't think it's overstating it at all. If anything, I would argue that code is more expressive than literature or music because it's more general. Consider the space of all possible video games, demos/intros, generative paintings, generative music, etc. which wouldn't be possible without code. I think you're confusing the common use of a medium with expressiveness. Many uses of ordinary language also aren't that i…

In the 1980s, you often had programmers create the art and music for games, but for the last three decades at least there have been dedicated artists and composers who often have no coding skill at all.

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#232

Post by customguy »

taybin wrote: post #120

> Code is a beautiful form of creative expression, as rich as literature or music I think this is overstating it and makes me wonder how familiar the author is with literature and music. Most programming is closer to plumbing. We come in, gripe about the guy who did the prior job, and solve a puzzle with some unique constraints. The reason LLMs are good at coding is because with coding we want boring, banal code.

Most programming is throwaway garbage, and if plumbing was treated remotely like that we'd be in deep shit, literally.

I never had plumbers come in and complain about the previous guy. They either changed something, or fixed something I caused. And whatever they did, it worked for years and decades, perfectly, even when I didn't treat it as well as I should have.

And to make things boring and banal is still an "art", for lack of a better word. You don't want your functions named like in minified code, you don't want ThisIsTheEntryPointOfTheProgram() either, and what do to instead can be subject of endless deliberation and discussion. We take all these "small" things for granted because we take churn and bloat for granted, and don't care, in a way plumbers would never. They don't have a new pipe material every week they install everywhere now, until the next fad that finally fixes everything for sure. They generally build stuff that lasts longer than people, so that profession is on a whole other planet IMO.

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#233

Post by linkregister »

gyulai wrote: post #163

I think that, even among those who have had the ability to code since before LLMs, the skill of coding has been in atrophy, and will continue to be so over the next 10 or 20 years. Learning to code, over the same period of time, will not be worthwhile. At the end of that process, cracks in the system will start to show: Namely, we will have nothing but LLM-generated code to train future LLMs on, and codebases for pro…

LLMs are trained with a large corpus of commercially available source code. However, intentional training on individual skills such as medicine, finance, mathematics, and software engineering is conducted to the tune of a few billion dollars per year.

Your scenario would only unfold if frontier labs decided not to compete on capabilities. It sounds unlikely.

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#234

Post by gyulai »

linkregister wrote: post #233
gyulai wrote: post #163

I think that, even among those who have had the ability to code since before LLMs, the skill of coding has been in atrophy, and will continue to be so over the next 10 or 20 years. Learning to code, over the same period of time, will not be worthwhile. At the end of that process, cracks in the system will start to show: Namely, we will have nothing but LLM-generated code to train future LLMs on, and codebases for pro…

LLMs are trained with a large corpus of commercially available source code. However, intentional training on individual skills such as medicine, finance, mathematics, and software engineering is conducted to the tune of a few billion dollars per year. Your scenario would only unfold if frontier labs decided not to compete on capabilities. It sounds unlikely.

How will they hire experts from those professions on whose output to train on, if they destroy the skills currently extant in those professions? Maybe lawyers will still read contracts every once in a while. Certainly, programmers around me no longer bother with reading code. ...and you can make an argument that a similar effect will happen that is widely observed in language-learners: Namely, if you only ever use a language passively (to read/listen), you're not necessarily able to use it actively (to write/speak).

> large corpus of commercially available source code

Like garbling up GitHub? Currently, people put hand-crafted code there to earn "street cred". Will people continue to do that, if AIs regurgitate their code without giving credit? Will people continue to bother with learning to code, when AI has reconfigured the economy to make this skill a worthless commodity?

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#235

Post by t_mahmood »

gyulai wrote: post #170
lowbloodsugar wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The coding we want for industry sure. Difference between IKEA and my uncle, an incredible, sought after carpenter.

> The coding we want for industry sure. Difference between IKEA and my uncle, an incredible, sought after carpenter. The thing is that programming was one of those rare crafts/arts, where you could have your cake and eat it too: Since you were writing all the code by hand, and since that process takes a fair bit of time anyway, you might as well write good code at no extra cost (which is where the artisanship comes i…

And when it's time to solve some bugs in these code base in a year, which one's going to be more expensive in terms of time, and tokens?

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#236

Post by citrin_ru »

wtfHN26 wrote: post #202
pydry wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been on this merry go round before with the "outsourcing to the cheapest programmers in india" boom. That slopfest ended with a new executive dogma of "hire only the best programmers" as so many of those projects were humiliating disasters which had to be junked. I do not think that was coincidental. Executive fashions can remain remarkably consistent and irrational for years as they try to make reality conform…

Funny you say that. Outsourcing to India never ended. The Indian Service companies kept growing over last two decades. Now many Western companies are setting up Global Capability Centers driving strategic innovation, IT, and R&D. So the work going to India has moved up from "outsourcing to the cheapest programmers in india" to "we will hire the best talent in India directly and set up our company's base there". To gi…

Outsourcing never ended but it did happen in waves. Right after ZIRR ended but before the AI panic multiple companies started to layoff in developers in western countries and double down on outsourcing to India. During ZIRP they employed more people in the US/EU and less work was outsourced.

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#237

Post by kypro »

tanker_war wrote: post #226
kypro wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Learning Classical Latin and Ancient Greek is also worthwhile. In what sense? From this perspective everything is worthwhile. If "worthwhile" is relative to learning other skills then Classical Latin and Ancient Greek is near the bottom of that pile, and you probably know what which is why you cited them. So then the question is where coding sits on that hierarchy, and if someone should learn to code vs acquiring o…

Surely you're capable of understanding that the term "worthwhile" has multiple meanings.

Yes, I'm not sure it was clear, but that was largely my point – to say it's "worthwhile" as a flat statement probably doesn't capture the nuance.

It's obviously going to be worthwhile in some sense as almost all skills are worthwhile to some degree. But normally when we're talking about whether something is worthwhile to learn we're weighing up other competing things we could be learning instead. In that sense I think it's far more debatable about whether coding is worthwhile to learn.

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#238

Post by tines »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #228
alightsoul wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like you two are on opposite sides of the same fence. The demo scene exists it's programming for fun and creative expression. Also the ioccc. That's the equivalent of a creatively written novel. Then there's writing for just a job like writing knowledge bases. That would be programming for plumbing aka crud and cloud.

The demo scene — as cool as it is — is an obscure hobby for a particular kind of nerd. The business side of programming puts food on the table for tens of millions of people.

Can't the same thing be said about literature and music?

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#239

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

tines wrote: post #238
yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The demo scene — as cool as it is — is an obscure hobby for a particular kind of nerd. The business side of programming puts food on the table for tens of millions of people.

Can't the same thing be said about literature and music?

No. And if it could, I sure as hell never would have become a programmer.

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#240

Post by weakfish »

irjustin wrote: post #122
StilesCrisis wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The babysitting work would still be impossible if you didn't actually know how to code.

For now, I can imagine a not too distant future where this is largely untrue. LLMs are an abstraction just like machine code -> assembly -> C/JVM -> some lang -> LLMs? At some point you stopped needing to understand the layer down because the layer you were on became so good. Yes there are always corner cases, but for the vast majority of developers/engineers out there, staying at your layer was enough to make a care…

IMO English as a programming language is a fools errand. Part of the reason why we _have_ programming languages is because it turns out human language is too ambiguous.
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