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Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs
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Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Just five years ago, the only way to build a working project of moderate complexity was to learn the basic to intermediate concepts required to make an MVP. > Now, if you can steer an LLM reasonably well, you can quickly build an MVP that goes well beyond your own understanding of the implementation. Somewhat agree. Five years ago you could build an MVP without understanding how to open TCP sockets or how to parse…
There's a pretty significant difference there, even in some of the examples you picked to make your point. TCP and HTTP are well defined standards that, for all their flaws, were designed and conceived to be useful abstractions that you didn't need to understand deeply in order to use. The things that LLMs allow novices to skip nowadays aren't designed with that in mind, and generally aren't something you can just sk…
imo that’s a good thing and people will gravitate towards companies that build actually good platforms.
with a bunch of competition, the best will be incentivized to not have these noob tier issues.
Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs
#73I answered this to myself - stop worrying about LLMs. It's pretty simple: due to Curry-Howard isomorphism, programming languages are just notations for some type of formal logic. Now ask yourself a question, what language do you want to maintain the programs in? Do you think natural language is going to be easier and more maintainable than formal logic? The answer is no. So you need programmers, people who can read t…
I agree with this but what I've been trying to answer the last few months is if there was an optimal language for the spec. As with you, I don't think it's English Markdown, but I don't think it's Java either. I also don't think it's Gherkin, Lisp perhaps? I'm still searching.
Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs
#74Sorry, programming is still fun. LLMs can't change that.
I'm curious - how do you explain the fact that as you look all around you, lesser number of devs are having fun?
Maybe you are thinking of programming at work. If so it might be legitimate but that's not what they addressed, they didn't say programming at work is fun.
Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs
#75I answered this to myself - stop worrying about LLMs. It's pretty simple: due to Curry-Howard isomorphism, programming languages are just notations for some type of formal logic. Now ask yourself a question, what language do you want to maintain the programs in? Do you think natural language is going to be easier and more maintainable than formal logic? The answer is no. So you need programmers, people who can read t…
LLMs do not execute natural language. Natural language describes a problem or request, and LLMs generate and test formal logic they predict will satisfy the request.
Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs
#76“I built a thing with AI and I don’t understand it. I want to make changes and fix things and have no ability to theorize why it fails or how to fix it.”
Oh my. See, you have to be able to program it yourself before you can build it with an LLM. Otherwise you have no way of judging the output. AI isn’t going to make you a programmer.
Learning to program is.
Interesting article. My advice is to do it the old fashioned, hard way. There’s no royal road to knowledge, skill, and learning.
Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Difficulty is too many technologies available. So a beginner needs something/someone that teaches principles. I have realized that simplier (boring) is better. E.g. simple html5 css combo is better instead of trying to navigate in JS frameworks.
>simple html5 css combo HTML is not a programming language IMHO. Javascript running in browser is not very interesting either.
> Javascript running in browser is not very interesting either.
Damn... that's honestly a shocking thing so say, if only for the fact that you can run in JS other languages. But even then, if you could "only" run JS it gives you access to a high level language but also all kind of inputs, from a keyboard and mouse, obviously, all the way to MIDI, hand tracking in WebXR, etc and all kind of outputs, e.g. screen, obviously, but also 6DoF XR, but you also get low level access to actual hardware. Totally anecdotal but I was precisely in my other browser window accessing my XR headset via adb via ... JavaScript in the browser, thanks to WebUSB. You can also run parallel computations via shaders but also WebGPU. The amount of things you can do is really mind blowing. You mind not like the syntax or some decision about the language itself but that somehow it's not interesting to have access to all that and more from any browser window is just surprising to me.
Last but not least, all that is done with 0 installation. You start a device, open the browser window, open the console and voila, you get a development environment instantly.
I just find it incredible.
Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs
#78(sorry pasting from 4 days ago but IMHO perfect fit)
The same reasons we keep on teaching kids to read, write, do math, sketch, take photos, etc ... because it is fun, empowering and important.
Most of them will never become professional actors, authors, mathematicians, artists, photographers, etc ... and yet they will rely on those skills, on their own or combined, pretty much every single day of their lives.
Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs
#79I answered this to myself - stop worrying about LLMs. It's pretty simple: due to Curry-Howard isomorphism, programming languages are just notations for some type of formal logic. Now ask yourself a question, what language do you want to maintain the programs in? Do you think natural language is going to be easier and more maintainable than formal logic? The answer is no. So you need programmers, people who can read t…
LLMs do not execute natural language. Natural language describes a problem or request, and LLMs generate and test formal logic they predict will satisfy the request.
I disagree with each sentence for a different reason.
LLMs interpret (so, "execute" in a way) natural language in the sense they have internal logic that assigns to the sequence of tokens in context a next token. If we delineate the input and output into a series of logical statements, we can think of it as a program that builds a logical statement from a list of input statements. So it encodes derivation in some logical system.
However, the internal logical system is informal in the sense that the above rules are not guaranteed to be sound on the fragment of classical logic encoded in the natural language. It is a close approximation, though, so it often works.
To add, half of my problem with natural language would be resolved by agreeing on exact definitions, which is kinda what LLMs do internally. However, they don't surface this formalization very well(even with open weights it's difficult), which makes it pretty unusable.
Re: Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs
#80I'm a software engineer, I do software development but also system maintenance, and I do handle networking and telephony systems, and work with some juniors. Working with AI is problematic. It can speed up you but at the same time delay you. For the system maintenance part sometimes you need to do a lot of stuff fast and in various machines and you can't just count on a cloud based AI oracle (that takes time) to do y…
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