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The Programmer Identity Crisis

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Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#7

Post by pteetor »

When COBOL was born, some people said, "It's English! We won't need programmers anymore!"

When SQL was born, some people said, "It's English! We won't need programmers anymore!"

Now we have AI prompting, and some people are saying, "It's English! We won't need programmers anymore!"

Really?

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#8

Post by happytoexplain »

psunavy03 wrote: post #4
protontypes wrote: post #3

Whenever I see an em dash (—), I suspect the entire text was written by an AI.

That says more about your lack of writing skills and understanding of grammar than AI.

That's simply not true, and pointlessly derogatory.

This article does not appear to be AI-written, but use of the emdash is undeniably correlated with AI writing. Your reasoning would only make sense if the emdash existed on keyboards. It's reasonable for even good writers to not know how or not care to do the extra keystrokes to type an emdash when they're just writing a blog post - that doesn't mean they have bad writing skills or don't understand grammar, as you have implied.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#9

Post by Legend2440 »

pteetor wrote: post #7

When COBOL was born, some people said, "It's English! We won't need programmers anymore!" When SQL was born, some people said, "It's English! We won't need programmers anymore!" Now we have AI prompting, and some people are saying, "It's English! We won't need programmers anymore!" Really?

The problem I have with this argument is that it actually is English this time.

COBOL and SQL aren't English, they're formal languages with keywords that look like English. LLMs work with informal language in a way that computers have never been able to before.

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