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What *is* code? (2015)

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Re: What *is* code? (2015)

#11

Post by nemosaltat »

iqp wrote: post #5

Beautifully written, a joy to read but, sadly, it feels like something from a bygone era. Nobody chants "Developers! Developers! Developers!" anymore now that everything is dominated by AI, and the joy of coding is gone too. People like Steve Yegge, who I used to aspire to be like back in 2006, when I started my career as a developer, now writes about how he uses 10+ concurrent LLM agents to code, review, and ship &…

Same, I got so much fomo from reading the gas town post I think you’re alluding too. Someone else can link it but it’s not “worth the read” in the way this was communicates so many ideas and captures/distills the zeitgeist of that time.

I guess the gas town one does capture our moment, but embracing YOLO spaghetti-o with reckless abandon, is a) depressing, even though I also feel like a middling programmer and b) actually seems to be dazzling these newer beleaguered bureaucrats precisely because they think they could just talk to the LLM instead of TMitTB.

Anyway, if that post and its ilk leave a bad taste, this was mouthwash for me. Lucky 10,000 I know, but I had never seen this (or felt so seen, as they say). I had to go check that he wasn’t wrong about PHP being Personal Home Page. I somehow never picked up that the recursive naming thing is a backcroynm.

Re: What *is* code? (2015)

#12

Post by kuharich »

dang wrote: post #2

Related. Others? What Is Code? (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33331697 - Oct 2022 (50 comments) What is code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17259483 - June 2018 (36 comments) What Is Code? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9698870 - June 2015 (356 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9699945

Re: What *is* code? (2015)

#13

Post by dominicrose »

stingraycharles wrote: post #9

Reminds me of this discussion between Alan Kay and Rich Hickey on this site 9 years ago. Rich Hickey always asserted that code is data (which aligns with the LISP view of the world), Alan Kay thinks that’s a bad idea. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11941656

Clojure is pretty similar to EDN which stands for extensible data notation.

cf. https://clojure.org/reference/reader

Re: What *is* code? (2015)

#15

Post by Cthulhu_ »

iqp wrote: post #5

Beautifully written, a joy to read but, sadly, it feels like something from a bygone era. Nobody chants "Developers! Developers! Developers!" anymore now that everything is dominated by AI, and the joy of coding is gone too. People like Steve Yegge, who I used to aspire to be like back in 2006, when I started my career as a developer, now writes about how he uses 10+ concurrent LLM agents to code, review, and ship &…

> It makes me think, "What am I even doing here - Why not just let the product manager prompt the LLM?".

It feels different if you replace "LLM" with "outsourcing". Thing is, instructing a team of software engineers what you want is a lot more work (they need a lot more handholding), a lot more expensive, and a lot slower. But I'd argue that the work is the same - writing specifications, adjusting accordingly. Minus the human factor.

LLM coding agents won't kill software development as a job, but it will affect outsourcing and agencies as an industry. Of course, outsourcing companies will / are using it too.

Re: What *is* code? (2015)

#16

Post by Cthulhu_ »

jurgenaut23 wrote: post #4

Wow. The guy can write, that’s for sure! And what a refreshment from f*king AI slop that you find everywhere these days.

You can say fucking here, one, we're all adults, two, there's no algorithms on HN penalising you (and if they were they'd penalise you anyway because it's not 1995 anymore), and three, it's almost insulting to believe replacing a letter with a star will make a word unrecognisable.

That said, this is why I like HN or any other kind of curated website, the voting systems and comments and the like will (hopefully) make sure low-effort writing will be filtered out.

Re: What *is* code? (2015)

#17

Post by christoph-heiss »

iqp wrote: post #5

Beautifully written, a joy to read but, sadly, it feels like something from a bygone era. Nobody chants "Developers! Developers! Developers!" anymore now that everything is dominated by AI, and the joy of coding is gone too. People like Steve Yegge, who I used to aspire to be like back in 2006, when I started my career as a developer, now writes about how he uses 10+ concurrent LLM agents to code, review, and ship &…

Why are you using LLMs then, if you enjoy the actual process of thinking about a problem and solving it by writing code?

It's definitely a more enjoyable world this way.

Re: What *is* code? (2015)

#18

Post by bossyTeacher »

olowe wrote: post #6

I was lost, literally, hitchhiking across the Australian outback when this article was published. Going home felt scary because I was afraid to be alone with no one else sharing my interests. Travelling made life enjoyable again because just surviving felt like an achievement. But I felt so, so isolated (again, literally!) from modern society. I wanted to find out why I was so deeply interested in computers but not i…

>some Linux nerds found me working as a receptionist answering phones and scanning paper records in at a failing medical practice. They got me doing desktop Windows and Linux server support. I’m an official software engineer now

There is a gap between receptionist and official software engineer. Please, give us more details about your journey and what happened in between

Re: What *is* code? (2015)

#19

Post by bossyTeacher »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #15
iqp wrote: post #5

Beautifully written, a joy to read but, sadly, it feels like something from a bygone era. Nobody chants "Developers! Developers! Developers!" anymore now that everything is dominated by AI, and the joy of coding is gone too. People like Steve Yegge, who I used to aspire to be like back in 2006, when I started my career as a developer, now writes about how he uses 10+ concurrent LLM agents to code, review, and ship &…

> It makes me think, "What am I even doing here - Why not just let the product manager prompt the LLM?". It feels different if you replace "LLM" with "outsourcing". Thing is, instructing a team of software engineers what you want is a lot more work (they need a lot more handholding), a lot more expensive, and a lot slower. But I'd argue that the work is the same - writing specifications, adjusting accordingly. Minus…

>LLM coding agents won't kill software development as a job

They won't same as the industrial revolution didn't kill farming as a job but it sure did ate up most of the farming roles. Most of the people you have ever met are people who would have been farmers had they been born before the revolution. Developers without much leverage, underpaid, overworked and competing with hundreds of experienced devs for a single role is likely to be the eventual future of most software development thus gradually becoming similar to other stem roles in terms of pay, competition and negotiation power.

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