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The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

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Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#161

Post by matheusmoreira »

Kinrany wrote: post #61
ares623 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can rent their own tools, more like.

No, they can make their own tools. They rent someone else's tools in the process of making their own tools.

One day people will not even be able to own computers anymore. They will be owned, controlled and rented out by corporate elites for limited purposes only. The personal computer will probably either cease to exist due to economic factors. It will probably be made illegal for citizens to own free computers. We'll probably need licenses to operate one.

The mere concept of people "making their own tools" is just comical in this bleak timeline.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#162

Post by intelVISA »

GuB-42 wrote: post #140
ryanmcl wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

The thing is that programming is not an end goal, it is a means to a end. No one is paying you to "write code", they are paying you to make a website shat serves as a storefront, to make a video game, something for accounting,... It turns out that in many of these cases, code is an effective way of doing it, but there may be other options. For a storefront, there are website builders that let you do it very effective…

Good lord, thank you. I'm a huge fan of LLMs, they've replaced enormous amounts of toil for me but they are not 'my job'.

If you walk to the kitchen and fry up an egg are you now a master chef? What's the difference between a surgeon and a butcher ...they both cut things?

Most shops never really needed development expertise in-house as there's no shortage of many decent tools equally suitable as code for getting machines to do most business things.

In some ways this is worse because while it's functionally the same black box intermediary as the alternative-to-code tools there's an illusion of control and more sunk cost. Do you want your sales team selling or learning JavaScript churning out goofy knock-offs for a well-solved problem?

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#163

Post by tralarpa »

chihuahua wrote: post #129
simonw wrote: post #58

I recently stumbled upon this delightfully titled book from 1982, "Application development without programmers": https://archive.org/details/applicationdevel00mart Which includes this excellent line: > Unfortunately, the winds of change are sometimes irreversible. The continuing drop in cost of computers has now passed the point at which computers have become cheaper than people. The number of programmers available p…

I guess the idea that a programmer can create software that then runs on multiple computers would have blown their mind.

VisiCalc was published in 1979.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#164

Post by tkiolp4 »

Kinrany wrote: post #61
ares623 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can rent their own tools, more like.

No, they can make their own tools. They rent someone else's tools in the process of making their own tools.

Not entirely true. For instance if I use LLMs to build an ios app I still need to pay apple $100 to use my own app for an undetermined amount of time.

If I build a web app i still need to pay for a domain, for a server for egress.

We are just renting. Wouldn’t be surprised if in the future this gets even more depressing

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#165

Post by svilen_dobrev »

nz wrote: post #115
ahsteele wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you write this? Do you have a link to the entire essay? I enjoyed the excerpt.

Yes, I wrote this, and you can find an intro/context to the _UNFINISHED_[1] essay here ( https://www.galacticbeyond.com/a-bridge-to-everywhere/ ), with a link to the PDF at the bottom. [1]: what you see is the first 5% of the essay, based on the notes that never made it in. Many topics are untouched, such as cults, caves, imagination, conspiracy, paranoia, fear, wakefulness, blindness, hallucinations, altering consci…

very interesting. esp. The "imagine the unwritten parts" :) For a long-time not seen anything letting me such freedom

May i suggest two/3 more/other directions to glance at?

- Strugatsky brothers - in "Snail on the slope" [1], chapter 3, (about page 11 in original) Peretz talks about understanding... "Проще поверить, чем понять. Проще разочароваться, чем понять. Проще плюнуть, чем понять. " -- in my flaky translation, "it's simpler to believe than to understand. it's simpler to get disappointed than to understand. it's simpler to spit than to understand". Have a look

- Pirsig's MoQ metaphysics of quality

- the mean-ings of word "mean"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snail_on_the_Slope

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#166

Post by snackbroken »

BobBagwill wrote: post #160

If most programming is ShitWork ® and most programmers are performing ShitWork and LLM's are good at ShitWork, then most programmers are out of a job. If those programmers can pivot to another non-ShitWork or programming-adjacent function, they can remain employed. There are bookoo other things people could be doing besides coding YASW [Yet Another Stupid Website].

Beaucoup.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#167

Post by nz »

svilen_dobrev wrote: post #165
nz wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I wrote this, and you can find an intro/context to the _UNFINISHED_[1] essay here ( https://www.galacticbeyond.com/a-bridge-to-everywhere/ ), with a link to the PDF at the bottom. [1]: what you see is the first 5% of the essay, based on the notes that never made it in. Many topics are untouched, such as cults, caves, imagination, conspiracy, paranoia, fear, wakefulness, blindness, hallucinations, altering consci…

very interesting. esp. The "imagine the unwritten parts" :) For a long-time not seen anything letting me such freedom May i suggest two/3 more/other directions to glance at? - Strugatsky brothers - in "Snail on the slope" [1], chapter 3, (about page 11 in original) Peretz talks about understanding ... "Проще поверить, чем понять. Проще разочароваться, чем понять. Проще плюнуть, чем понять. " -- in my flaky translatio…

Thank you, I will check these out!

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#168

Post by elzbardico »

Havoc wrote: post #5
cjfd wrote: post #2

The article talks about 'software development will be democratized' but the current LLM hype is quite the opposite. The LLMs are owned by large companies and are quite impossible to train by any individual, if only because of energy costs. The situation where I am typing my code on my linux machine is much more democratic.

It is democratising from the perspective of non-programmers- they can now make their own tools. What you say about big tech is true at same time though. I worry about what happens when China takes the lead and no longer feels the need to do open models. First hints already showing - advance access to ds4 only for Chinese hardware makers

Programming is probably the most democratized profession ever.

The problem was never access barriers, but the fact that people are too lazy to study even a 200-300 pages on something as simple as ruby on rails.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#169

Post by elzbardico »

ryanmcl wrote: post #70
simonw wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often think about how the modern world genuinely does run on Excel formulas, many written by amateurs, most without automated tests and with version control based on final_final_v2 suffixes. Somehow civilization continues to function! Makes me a bit less terrified that untested vibe coded slop will sink the economy. It's not that different from how things work already.

[dead]

No. it was not. You could build a passable online shop after reading a django or ruby on rails book (250, 300 pages), and a couple tutorials to deploy it in some ease to use platform.

Maybe it wouldn't be visually nice, but you would understand what you've built, which is something really really important if you are processing online payments.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#170

Post by elzbardico »

SoftTalker wrote: post #122
hearsathought wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> non-programmers began programming without knowing they were Using excel in the traditional sense isn't the same as programming. Unless they were doing some VBA or something like that which the vast majority of excel/spreadsheet users don't. > spreadsheet formulae formulas. We aren't speaking latin here. > I see an analog with AI-generated code: the disciplined among us know we are programming and consider error and…

Excel was the biggest example of a "4GL" that actually succeeded. They mentioned Access but Excel was by far more widely used. Excel enabled analysts to do so much on their own that they used to have to ask programmers in their IT department to do. Other spreadsheets too, at first, but Excel ended up dominating.

And it was an excellent local optimization that incurred giant costs for the whole organization. Every single place where there are this parallel excel IT world is a fucking security/compliance/data-security nightmare.
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