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It's not the end of programming

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Re: It's not the end of programming

#51

Post by barnabee »

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

So programming "ended" if it's no longer such a dominant profession, even if plenty of people still do it as an art/craft/hobby and some of them even get paid to do so?

Doesn't sound like the "end of programming" to me, more a reduction in the number of programming jobs. One that if anything is overdue - many developers today get paid to do jobs that shouldn't need to exist even without AI.

Re: It's not the end of programming

#52

Post by barnabee »

duckqlz wrote: post #39
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 engineeri…

Not all software is (or should be) engineering…

Re: It's not the end of programming

#53

Post by jscd »

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…

> And with software it’s even harder as software was never targeted at the mass.

Do products like Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Office Suite not count as “targeted at mass?” People—normal people—absolutely used to pay for software before SaaS took hold.

I don’t think the problem is that normal people don’t want to buy ““artisan software”” but that people are so cynical about software companies that giving them any money at all is asking to have the rug pulled out from under you.

Re: It's not the end of programming

#54

Post by pydry »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #28
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…

Printing presses are not typewriters. The printing press did displace the manual copying of manuscripts, which had insanely low bandwidth and generally kinda sucked for everyone involved. But for several hundred years after, until the industrial revolution and the mass production of mechanical typewriters, pretty much everything printed on a printing press was originally authored by hand. Even with typewriters handwr…

One thing that strikes me about these discussions is just how awful the metaphors are.

We're constantly being told that jobs designing and building skyscrapers are close to obsolete because some yokel made a factory that manufactures yurts.

Writing hand crafted code for the sole use of an individual never happened. Writing hand crafted code to be run by millions of people is routine. You can't compare it to a spinning jenny, a printing press, the motor car or indeed any other technological invention that scaled production. It is nonsensical by definition.

I think a lot of people just dont want to hear that LLMs are a step change and not actually revolutionary. Theres too much invested in them being world changing at this point. Blockchain was the same.

Re: It's not the end of programming

#55

Post by kodoman »

NichoPaolucci wrote: post #43

I think that coding by hand is largely not going to occur anymore. What that does to the learning of new developers + the stagnation of old developers? I do not know. I believe that what makes a good developer (a great developer, really) is the ability to do something at the smallest level "perfectly" or close to it. Chaining those tiny building blocks together. Understanding the entire flow of data + logically. Maki…

It's really interesting to the vagueness of natural language and the fact that it's actually impossible to express a single concrete meaning in natural language. That is to say their is always a set of possible interpretations one can never simple refer to one single thing and a program in a programming language is always only one thing (I know that you could argue that compiling to different machine code means their is vagueness since it might produce a x86-64 binary or a powerpc binary and the issue of UB but you see my point).

I do think that if one simply 'vibe codes' something they can never really understand the program even if they prompted it unless they study the source in detail. In natural language you can only ever point to a set of things that containing a subset of thing(s) you want.

Re: It's not the end of programming

#56

Post by skydhash »

Borg3 wrote: post #50
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…

Yeah right, like I want to take over the shit broccoli haired nephews created... Even for 3x paycheck.. The one who takes it is a looser, being exploited for pennies to fix all the shit. And I bet at the end, you will be fired anyway, because you are not of their kind.. Winners are managers (who hired nephews) and nephews themselfs, they did barely any usefull job and got paid a lot. They should do usefull job instea…

> Winners are managers (who hired nephews) and nephews themselfs, they did barely any usefull job and got paid a lot.

That is what the hype is about. They created their kingdom/empire with software and data. And they’ve been looking for any solution that promises to replace programmers. LLM is the best mirage ao far and have grown to cult level.

Re: It's not the end of programming

#57

Post by bgarbiak »

The responses about code quality, wisdom that comes with experience, etc. are missing the big picture: no one will ever care about any of this as long as things work as explained in the prompt.

Eventual shortcomings will be fixed not by looking into the code, but by typing in another prompt, asking another agent.

Doing it manually will not bring any value to anyone.

I saw it already with my own eyes: a friend of mine started an online psychology counseling site. A year ago they would hire a developer. Now, he only needed an LLM. And it’s the whole thing: a booking system, video calls, a website. What’s underneath: he doesn’t know. The only thing that matters to him is that it works.

That to me looks like the end of programming.

Re: It's not the end of programming

#58

Post by kodoman »

bgarbiak wrote: post #57

The responses about code quality, wisdom that comes with experience, etc. are missing the big picture: no one will ever care about any of this as long as things work as explained in the prompt. Eventual shortcomings will be fixed not by looking into the code, but by typing in another prompt, asking another agent. Doing it manually will not bring any value to anyone. I saw it already with my own eyes: a friend of mine…

Can he trust it's secure? Does what about when something goes wrong. Ops issues might come into play and just handing AI agent ssh keys could cause all sorts of issues. Only time will tell though I guess.

Re: It's not the end of programming

#59

Post by boomlinde »

pydry wrote: post #54
marginalia_nu wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Printing presses are not typewriters. The printing press did displace the manual copying of manuscripts, which had insanely low bandwidth and generally kinda sucked for everyone involved. But for several hundred years after, until the industrial revolution and the mass production of mechanical typewriters, pretty much everything printed on a printing press was originally authored by hand. Even with typewriters handwr…

One thing that strikes me about these discussions is just how awful the metaphors are. We're constantly being told that jobs designing and building skyscrapers are close to obsolete because some yokel made a factory that manufactures yurts. Writing hand crafted code for the sole use of an individual never happened. Writing hand crafted code to be run by millions of people is routine. You can't compare it to a spinnin…

> Writing hand crafted code for the sole use of an individual never happened.

It seems bizarre in a way to see this sentiment on hacker news.

Re: It's not the end of programming

#60

Post by kodoman »

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…

Printing press did not kill writing at all, only the job of scribes. One still had to write their ideas down and work on a manuscript and some one had to set the press up (not trivial at all). All that is to say that I think the ability to write code from scratch is still necessary while I don't really think the printing press metaphor is apt I think being able to write scripts and write small programs to do stuff you want by hand is still useful even though it's true that LLM's can do this sometimes you want to understand the thing fully and to work exactly how you want it.
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