Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Programmer Identity Crisis

hojberg.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 317 posts

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#21

Post by kazinator »

defgeneric wrote: post #13
protontypes wrote: post #3

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

I'm seeing this reaction a lot from younger people (say, roughly under 25). And it's a shame this new suspicion has now translated into a prohibition on the use of dashes.

I use three hyphens. In my case, I picked it up from Knuth's TeX many years ago; it's a lexical notation which typesets to a proper em dash.

Three hyphens---it looks good! When I use three hyphens, it's like I dropped three fast rounds out of a magazine. It demands attention.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#22

Post by kazinator »

almosthere wrote: post #15
defgeneric wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm seeing this reaction a lot from younger people (say, roughly under 25). And it's a shame this new suspicion has now translated into a prohibition on the use of dashes.

It's comical too because the only reason AI uses emdashes is because it was so common before AI.

It's utterly uncommon in the kind of casual writing for which people are using AI, that's why it got noticed. Social media posts, blogs, ...

AI almost certainly picked it up mainly from typeset documents, like PDF papers.

It's also possible that some models have a tokenizing rule for recognizing faked-out em-dashes made of hyphens and turning them into real em-dash tokens.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#23

Post by benji-york »

johnisgood wrote: post #12
happytoexplain wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Pressing "-" and a space gets replaced by an emdash to me in LibreOffice. No extra keystrokes required.

I don't think the character is that uncommon in the output of slightly-sophisticated writers and is not hard to generate (e.g., on macOS pressing option-shift-minus generates an em-dash).

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#24

Post by saxenaabhi »

skydhash wrote: post #11
Legend2440 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Say that to the prompt guys and their AGENT.md rules. Formalism is way easier than whatever this guys are concocting. And true programmer bliss is live programming. Common programming is like writing a sheet music and having someone else play it. Live programming is you at the instrument tweaking each part.

Yes natural languages are by nature ambiguous. Sometimes it's better to write specification in code rather than in a natural language(Jetbrains MPS for example).

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#25

Post by names_are_hard »

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 thing is... All those people were right. We no longer need the kinds of people we used to call programmers. There exists a new job, only semi related, that now goes by the name programmer. I don't know how many of the original programming professionals managed to make the transition to this new progression.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#26

Post by layer8 »

Legend2440 wrote: post #9
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.

On the other hand, the problem is exactly that it’s not a formal language.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#27

Post by greymalik »

> One could only wonder why they became a programmer in the first place, given their seeming disinterest in coding.

To solve problems. Coding is the means to an end, not the end itself.

> careful configuration of our editor, tinkering with dot files, and dev environments

That may be fun for you, but it doesn’t add value. It’s accidental complexity that I am happy to delegate.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#28

Post by RamtinJ95 »

I think "Identity Crisis" is a bit over dramatic, but I for the most part agree with the sentiment. I have written something in the same vane, but still different enough that I would love to comment it but its just way more efficient to point to my post. I hope that is OK: https://handmadeoasis.com/ai-and-software-engineering-the-co...

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#30

Post by moritzwarhier »

Legend2440 wrote: post #9
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.

This is true.

But in faithful adherence to some kind of uncertainty principle, LLM prompts are also not a programming language, no matter if you turn down the temperature to zero and use a specialized coding model.

They can just use programming languages as their output.

Post reply on HN