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Why care about programming languages

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Re: Why care about programming languages

#11

Post by geraneum »

kusokurae wrote: post #4
alpha_trion wrote: post #2

I think a lot of folks in the industry are feeling this way. It’s an existential crisis for many of us right now. Why bother progressing when slop is “good enough”? Some of us still care but I have a feeling there are a lot of people that don’t.

Good enough IFF you are dealing with a cute web app or simple SAAS or something. Software engineers feeling down should think about software designed to track medication administration, or validate their tax calculations, or to decide whether to flag you for a CIFAS marker, or whatever, and then imagine the generic "fuck it, that'll do" type vibecoder-level-engineer handling the code.

Even on a less dangerous level, repeated mistakes can be detrimental to your business. Imagine a typical ecommerce app for selling anything. Mess with people’s orders and money and you’ll go out of business or get sued or get a bad reputation. This not even about AI, it’s just how business works.

Re: Why care about programming languages

#13

Post by kfreds »

xscott wrote: post #8

There's a lot that's worth thinking about and discussing on this topic, but it's too loaded with emotional stuff for many people to hope for a productive discussion. I'm a programming languages nerd. I was paid to program in over 20 different languages over my 25 year career. I read up on many more languages along the way, and I wrote pet projects in a few of those. I've written a couple assemblers, compilers, and in…

I agree. I believe LLMs are ushering in a new golden age for programming language design and implementation.

Re: Why care about programming languages

#15

Post by xscott »

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #5

Can't remember who said it, but I think the most poignant commentary about the prospects of LLMs completely replacing humans is the simple observation that yes, you can delegate many if not all of your tasks requiring thinking to LLMs, but it is inherently impossible to delegate the task of understanding . If you hope to write an efficient prompt which gives you what you think you want, you need to actually understan…

> would you rather review LLM-written assembly or LLM-written Haskell?

I wish we had a language that was targeted specifically for LLMs to write and humans and LLMs to inspect:

- Simple robust syntax

- One obvious way to do things

- Static type checking

- Purely functional encouraged, escape hatches for performance

- Inspect-able, testable, and reviewable in small pieces

- Something like formal predicates, preconditions, post-conditions, assertions, or effects typing

Giving LLMs all the surface area of Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, or C++ seems like a huge mistake. It's amazing it works as well as it does. Well written Haskell is beautiful, but there are way too many ways to write Haskell:

https://people.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html

Re: Why care about programming languages

#16

Post by brabel »

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #6
alpha_trion wrote: post #2

I think a lot of folks in the industry are feeling this way. It’s an existential crisis for many of us right now. Why bother progressing when slop is “good enough”? Some of us still care but I have a feeling there are a lot of people that don’t.

There's very little evidence, if any, to suggest that slop is actually "good enough". I have interacted with multiple apps that clearly were written using AI by people who did not actually spend the time understanding what was made, and it most certainly was not an experience that I would classify as "good enough". I know this may be some kind of reverse survivorship bias and that I simply do not notice all of the sl…

> I have interacted with multiple apps that clearly were written using AI by people who did not actually spend the time understanding what was made…

That kind of proves the opposite point: you’re using those apps so they were good enough for the people who made it to get to you who would probably never even be able go write an app. Also are you comparing the apps to your average, bug ridden app written before LLMs existed? Maybe they’re not that much worse.

Re: Why care about programming languages

#17

Post by bigstrat2003 »

You should care about programming languages because humans are still better at programming than an LLM (yes, even better than $currrent_newest_model). And if you care about what you are making, you should be writing the code yourself. If you don't care about making something good, then yeah you don't need to actually learn how to program, but that's no way to work.

Re: Why care about programming languages

#18

Post by B-Con »

xscott wrote: post #15
ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #5

Can't remember who said it, but I think the most poignant commentary about the prospects of LLMs completely replacing humans is the simple observation that yes, you can delegate many if not all of your tasks requiring thinking to LLMs, but it is inherently impossible to delegate the task of understanding . If you hope to write an efficient prompt which gives you what you think you want, you need to actually understan…

> would you rather review LLM-written assembly or LLM-written Haskell? I wish we had a language that was targeted specifically for LLMs to write and humans and LLMs to inspect: - Simple robust syntax - One obvious way to do things - Static type checking - Purely functional encouraged, escape hatches for performance - Inspect-able, testable, and reviewable in small pieces - Something like formal predicates, preconditi…

Go seems like a pragmatic fit, even though it was obviously not designed for LLMs and nor is it purely functional.

I review a lot of Go code, which means I review a lot of LLM Go code. Even though the human vs LLM authorship distinction has strong signals, Go's simple nature seems like a useful constraint on how LLMs can express themselves.

Re: Why care about programming languages

#19

Post by hcfman »

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #5

Can't remember who said it, but I think the most poignant commentary about the prospects of LLMs completely replacing humans is the simple observation that yes, you can delegate many if not all of your tasks requiring thinking to LLMs, but it is inherently impossible to delegate the task of understanding . If you hope to write an efficient prompt which gives you what you think you want, you need to actually understan…

That’s a little black and white though. It’s ruling out that the AI could make a pretty good guess as to what you likely wanted to convey. If it gets that right, then you didn’t need to understand it nearly much.

When I observe its reasoning I see it doing this all the time.

Re: Why care about programming languages

#20

Post by geraneum »

hcfman wrote: post #19
ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #5

Can't remember who said it, but I think the most poignant commentary about the prospects of LLMs completely replacing humans is the simple observation that yes, you can delegate many if not all of your tasks requiring thinking to LLMs, but it is inherently impossible to delegate the task of understanding . If you hope to write an efficient prompt which gives you what you think you want, you need to actually understan…

That’s a little black and white though. It’s ruling out that the AI could make a pretty good guess as to what you likely wanted to convey. If it gets that right, then you didn’t need to understand it nearly much. When I observe its reasoning I see it doing this all the time.

How does the AI guess?
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