Yes. Technological progress is almost always slower than people imagine.
Will humans write code in 2040?
21–30 of 50 posts
Re: Will humans write code in 2040?
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, the level of abstractions will just change. We might end up writing something more like formal logic in a declarative language and the AI will then implement and optimise it. Kind of the way a compiler generates optimised machine code from our higher level languages now.
Also don’t forget - we still have to write certain routines in Assembly even after so many years. Number of abstraction layers doesn’t mean complete automation.
Going from high level to low level code will not go away. But, for the most part you would probably try to get something working and then optimize it.
http://wiki.c2.com/?PrematureOptimization
Re: Will humans write code in 2040?
#23I mostly get downvoted for questioning the AI hype, but I never tried it here in HN. The paper is... how I put it mildly... not in the realm of making sense. They mention simple question answering (which still stumbles at more complex even if structured questions), then code generators that existed since 1980s (at least) and then pretend that it's the same. Today's AI is about approximating human judgment from datase…
I think it is not about AI but about improving our work with new tools. There are zillion developers doing the same thing everyday with the same mistakes and a lot of this work can be encapsulated at different abstraction levels.
I think it's subtly different in a very important way: there are a zillion developers doing almost the same thing everyday with almost the same mistakes.
The devil is in the almost. That's where the inability to trivially design a framework to cover all those cases comes in. That's the little subtle differences in business logic, that turn into different flavors of tech debt, that keep people in a job for a long time.
Tools and abstractions will improve, but here's the flip side: have you ever worked on a project where you consistently delivered 100% of what the stakeholders asked for, on time, with no negotiation or compromise needed? I haven't, so I think the more we can deliver, the more that will be asked, for quite a while.
Re: Will humans write code in 2040?
#24I mostly get downvoted for questioning the AI hype, but I never tried it here in HN. The paper is... how I put it mildly... not in the realm of making sense. They mention simple question answering (which still stumbles at more complex even if structured questions), then code generators that existed since 1980s (at least) and then pretend that it's the same. Today's AI is about approximating human judgment from datase…
Yes, I wonder how much time if any people predicting our coming doom and the death of every job ever have spent working with the bleeding edge technology of AI but... it's not much better than AI has been for the past several decades.
Data sets have gotten significantly larger, which makes predictive statistics based off it better.
The professors I've talked to/studied under who work on AI certainly do not share the same concerns.
Re: Will humans write code in 2040?
#25The idea seems a bit outlandish, but I could easily see many coding jobs vanish. We wrote a performance-oriented library (a regex matcher) and invested huge numbers of person-hours tweaking and tuning and building new, faster subsystems. It's not a giant leap of faith to imagine a 'Gold' version (correct but not fast) being written by a human and most of the tuning/tweaking/test generation/etc being automated. I doub…
Sounds a lot like a compiler.
Re: Will humans write code in 2040?
#26I mostly get downvoted for questioning the AI hype, but I never tried it here in HN. The paper is... how I put it mildly... not in the realm of making sense. They mention simple question answering (which still stumbles at more complex even if structured questions), then code generators that existed since 1980s (at least) and then pretend that it's the same. Today's AI is about approximating human judgment from datase…
its hard to say how fast progress will continue, but I do think by that time we will need substantially less than today, maybe 10% of the work force we have now. 23 years ago it would have took a team many years to do what a single person can put out in a weekend. I dont think AI will be the single biggest driver though, mostly APIs getting more sophisticated. we (those that work in tech) have been lucky that the mor…
>23 years ago it would have took a team many years to do what a single person can put out in a weekend
Are you sure? How big was the original Unix team? I suspect it's smaller than Microsoft's Windows team is these days.
If anything, I think you have larger software teams now than ever before.
Re: Will humans write code in 2040?
#27Fundamentally, I see programming as the task of describing what a computer should to. The way we create these instructions have definitely changed during the past 20 years, especially with the large open source movement and stuff like pip and npm. We have higher levels of abstraction now, the LEGO blocks we assemble are larger and more reusable.
In my experience it feels like most of the low hanging fruits, when it comes to abstractions, already have been picked. The databases, ORMs, web servers, UI-frameworks, parsers/encoders, crypto stuff etc. are all pre-built LEGO pieces I use and connect with each other. And it feels like the connection part is my main job.
I would predict that we code mostly in the same way in 2040 as we do now, with the approximately same level of abstraction, but with much better tooling. I want an AI that can continuously read my code as I write it and tell me when I've done a stupid misstake and turned the LEGO block the wrong way.
Also isn't a main problem of professional software development to understand what another human wants me to instruct the computer to do? If my project leader / customer can't manage to instruct another human on how the program should work, can we expect an AI to do better? Of course, the AI can respond quicker on Slack, and ask questions based on knowledge it has from previous projects and have sane defaults based on experience, but still. I'm sceptical.
Re: Will humans write code in 2040?
#28Fundamentally, I see programming as the task of describing what a computer should to. The way we create these instructions have definitely changed during the past 20 years, especially with the large open source movement and stuff like pip and npm. We have higher levels of abstraction now, the LEGO blocks we assemble are larger and more reusable. In my experience it feels like most of the low hanging fruits, when it c…
> The databases, ORMs, web servers, UI-frameworks, parsers/encoders, crypto stuff etc. are all pre-built LEGO pieces I use and connect with each other.
Keep in mind there is far more programming than Web programming in the world. It's important to keep that perspective when ruminating on programming at large, and based on the pieces you mentioned, it sounds like you're limiting yourself to that mindset. (That's OK.)
Re: Will humans write code in 2040?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it is not about AI but about improving our work with new tools. There are zillion developers doing the same thing everyday with the same mistakes and a lot of this work can be encapsulated at different abstraction levels.
I agree, the level of abstractions will just change. We might end up writing something more like formal logic in a declarative language and the AI will then implement and optimise it. Kind of the way a compiler generates optimised machine code from our higher level languages now.
>I agree, the level of abstractions will just change. We might end up writing something more like formal logic in a declarative language and the AI will then implement and optimise it.
We've tried. The problem with layers of abstraction is that they're leaky, and don't always work.
For example, simple SQL is easy. Optimizing SQL requires intimate knowledge of your db engine.
Re: Will humans write code in 2040?
#30it's called prolog
its closer. in the end I think its too fussy. what do you think of the datalog inspired languages?