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It's not the end of programming

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Re: It's not the end of programming

#31

Post by Arodex »

fnoef wrote: post #18

People keep giving examples like printed press, or whatever, but honestly the printed press did kill writing/drawing by hand. When was the last time you bought a hand written book or a hand painted picture? Sure, they still exist, but they are priced and marketed towards a specific class of people, and not the mass. And with software it’s even harder as software was never targeted at the mass. Software was always a b…

People really need to stop finding one vaguely similar situation in the past and say "this is what will happen". The past is a different country, and the outcomes depend on many factors and aren't predestined.

Re: It's not the end of programming

#33

Post by boomlinde »

fnoef wrote: post #18

People keep giving examples like printed press, or whatever, but honestly the printed press did kill writing/drawing by hand. When was the last time you bought a hand written book or a hand painted picture? Sure, they still exist, but they are priced and marketed towards a specific class of people, and not the mass. And with software it’s even harder as software was never targeted at the mass. Software was always a b…

Drawing, not buying hand-painted pictures. Writing, not buying hand-written books. You seem to have fundamentally misunderstood the argument.

Re: It's not the end of programming

#34

Post by lacedeconstruct »

fnoef wrote: post #18

People keep giving examples like printed press, or whatever, but honestly the printed press did kill writing/drawing by hand. When was the last time you bought a hand written book or a hand painted picture? Sure, they still exist, but they are priced and marketed towards a specific class of people, and not the mass. And with software it’s even harder as software was never targeted at the mass. Software was always a b…

>When was the last time you bought a hand written book or a hand painted picture?

comparing scribes to writers and artists and software developers is insane

Re: It's not the end of programming

#35

Post by shevy-java »

I think AI brings in many problems. It also brings in new functionality for people unable or unwilling to write working programs on their own.

My number #1 gripe of AI is that you become dependent on external companies. I am no loner willing to go that route in general, but even less so when it comes to greedy US corporations that constantly abuse mankind.

My number #2 gripe is that AI is ... dumb. I am noticing this on youtube. So many fake-videos appearing, and while I in general do not watch them for the most part, they are incredibly deceitful. And ... dumb. It's just a waste of time to watch them, even more so than it is already a waste of time watching videos on youtube (I often have them just for background music in the browser, for music at the least).

AI also makes projects less interesting to contribute to. If 99% of the contributions come by AI, why would I want to be bothered to "get involved"? Ruby has this problem right now. Granted, AI is a helper tool, but boy, what a fake it is - Hiroshi Shibata suddenly has perfect english skills, but it is AI slop generated. So I am no longer "interacting" with humans but with the AI slop. That's not worth my time.

AI also is very ruthless against programming languages being bad in certain areas. Case in point: documentation. If AI can slop AI spam generate documentation, even if it is not perfect, whereas I need to manually search for ruby documentation while Google has crippled its search engine to become useless, then this is now a huge disadvantage I am at with. Searching for stuff takes time. Ruby is just an example here; you can extend this to many other projects, including non-programming languages. We need better documentation, but oddly enough the documentation is constantly getting worse in the last +5 years or so. AI skynet is cannibalizing us - people don't seem to realise or care. I somewhat gave up on trying to nudge people to seriously improve their documentation, they just don't seem to want to (not all, but most).

Re: It's not the end of programming

#36

Post by pydry »

sdevonoes wrote: post #12

If someone comes with a pretty decent idea and execution, it doesn’t really matter if code was written by human or llm, does it? Like if the next torvalds ships something great in the open, who cares how was it written.

>Like if the next torvalds ships something great in the open, who cares how was it written.

nope. but, vibe coded slop is all we're actually seeing.

Re: It's not the end of programming

#38

Post by ed_elliott_asc »

owebmaster wrote: post #22
mapontosevenths wrote: post #10

Every other time that programming has gotten easier we got more (often worse) code, though some folks who made their livings exploiting the inefficiencies had to adapt. This will be the same. This isn't the end of programming, it's the beginning of your broccoli haired nephews ability to program. It's also opening a whole new world of opportunity to those with real skill. A world filled with mountains of terrible cod…

> This isn't the end of programming, it's the beginning of your broccoli haired nephews ability to program Which is funny because that was the case 25+ years ago. We (the nephews) would create websites using PHP. It was common for 15, 16 years old teenagers to know more about tech than the adults. That's not the case anymore. So this time it might be different.

Luckily the kids this time have lots of different opportunities than just tech, they have crypto, social media, and etc

Re: It's not the end of programming

#39

Post by duckqlz »

fnoef wrote: post #18

People keep giving examples like printed press, or whatever, but honestly the printed press did kill writing/drawing by hand. When was the last time you bought a hand written book or a hand painted picture? Sure, they still exist, but they are priced and marketed towards a specific class of people, and not the mass. And with software it’s even harder as software was never targeted at the mass. Software was always a b…

I’m confused by your example. Prior to the printing press, hand written books (or any reading material) would not have been accessible to the masses; hence the low literacy rates.

Furthermore, while no one was saying “I’m going to go buy WinZip now”, many were lining up to buy WinRAR?

Finally, the issue with “high quality hand crafted software” is that software and similar projects are made possible through engineering not through artistry.

Simply put:

"Engineering is achieving function while avoiding failure." — Henry Petroski

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