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Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

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Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#251

Post by ionwake »

Great quote: "...the things they will build with that abstraction will surprise me."

It’s bittersweet that perhaps the next generation will never truly understand how utterly insane it was that small companies were paying developers like me good money to read books, then struggle for months to create a simple CRUD app that could have simply been copied, but the company “felt it was right to build their own custom one from scratch.” This would then lead to endless management meetings full of middle managers who never truly felt comfortable turning on a laptop, only for the end result to become a mess of functionality destroyed by committee, shifting goalposts, blame directed at fired programmers, and years of completely wasted human and financial capital — all for a monstrosity built in Flash one year before it was deprecated.

My only consolation is that if the new generation never knows the true horror of human ignorance, perhaps it will spare them the generational shame.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#252

Post by dspillett »

sevenzero wrote: post #249
gchamonlive wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a different impression, that the folks here are divided in this issue, with a half being AI maximalists saying it's a necessary evil while the other half condemning such practices, maybe not as much as to protect copyright per se, but because there are two different measures here. While teenagers get ridiculous fines for sharing MP3, big corp gets the free pass for stealing data on a industrial scale.

If AI was public domain and free for everyone, I would have less issues with it (not saying no issues). But yeah, the only people actually benefiting from this are big tech corps who actively destroy society since over a decade now. The argument about the ability to self host doesn't really make sense to me given that most of society can not even afford RAM at the moment. So all these big tech frontier models should…

> because of economic pressures

Self-hosting isn't relevant here anyway. When discussing the hoovering up of information irrespective of licences to produce the model, where the model is finally run isn't significant.

You might not be paying the industry pirates-at-scale to run a model on their hardware, but you are still using the same information, irrespective of the same desires of its creators, the same way, just in a different location.

Heck, local hosting might even be making the situation worse if people are trying to train their own model because they are then likely to be scraping data too, and becoming part of the army of bots that are pushing hosting costs up and forcing everyone to use tricks like PoW scripts that can inconvenience human readers as much as the scrapers.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#254

Post by eager_learner »

runjake wrote: post #179
jonbodner wrote: post #143

I'm the author of O'Reilly's "Learning Go". Here are the last 13 months of paperback book sales: - Mar 2026: 124 - Feb 2026: 140 - Jan 2026: 157 - Dec 2025: 306 - Nov 2025: 484 - Oct 2025: 218 - Sep 2025: 176 - Aug 2025: 136 - Jul 2025: 317 - Jun 2025: 230 - May 2025: 237 - Apr 2025: 165 - Mar 2025: 367 Sales are certainly down, but it has gone up and down in the past. Since the 1st edition came out in 2021, it has s…

2 of May 2026 is me! Learning Go is such a great book.

what's so good about it? I bought it as well, but I have yet to start it (I'm stuck in some other books for now).

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#255

Post by mejutoco »

klausa wrote: post #211
brnt wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Compare that to looking inside a C++ standard library: It's not impossible, but it's of a completely different nature of normal C++ we might write for a business. C++ isn't a language, it's a script. Like Latin, it can be used to express English, Polish and Indonesian.

Latin can't be used to express Polish; at least not without extra letters, at which point I think it ceases to be "just" Latin script? But maybe that was also your point.

I like this metaphor.

Spanish ñ, Catalan or French ç, German ß. Similarly for ł and other Polish letters. It seems strictly speaking the latin alphabet cannot cover many european languages. But mostly we can say latin can express that. You can write "ss" for German and l for Polish, etc, so it can definitely be used. Source: whatssap messages.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#256

Post by sevenzero »

dspillett wrote: post #250
sevenzero wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>which have indexed all of the books and used pirated copies to do so Funnily enough, people on HN often do not consider this an issue, like at all... I wonder how they'd think about it if they had created something (meaningful) that was subjected to this. I love Go and learned it a lot in the past 2 years but ultimately put it down in favor of more "batteries included" solutions as I don't trust myself enough as a d…

> > which have indexed all of the books and used pirated copies to do so > Funnily enough, people on HN often do not consider this an issue, like at all... That is far from true - opinion is quite divided, perhaps even close to 50/50. It sometimes seems that the opinion is skewed massively towards the positive because there are a lot more “look what I did with GenAI” stories because “yeah, I'm not doing that because……

>That is far from true - opinion is quite divided

That might be true if you look further into it. I am a casual frontpage reader and the frontpage usually is plastered with AI stuff. Either new bullshit benchmarks, AI workflows, AI editor updates, AI company did something bad (again), or cool(?) projects people vibecoded. I also had arguments about AI used for art on here before and my personal experience usually is people defending their slop art.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#257

Post by CharlieDigital »

sodafountan wrote: post #10
CharlieDigital wrote: post #2

It's a shame because to guide a coding agent, you need to have the right grammar and vocabulary to describe what you want and how you want it to be built. Junior devs should read not because they need to know how to write the code, but they need to know the vocabulary and the grammar to guide the agents.

I was wondering about this myself, but given everything I know about AI. Won't the vocabulary slowly and subtly change as common people try to develop software, not knowing the jargon? Won't the AI systems learn from the prompts and adjust their understanding of what's trying to be accomplished?

It will regress to the mean.

The default output of any agent is going to be Transaction Script, for example. It will never on its own accord start writing Domain Model.

As it produces more Transaction Script and sesles its own Transaction Script, it will regress to this paradigm.

You can get it to write Domain Model, but that is not its default.

I liken it to examples in docs: they are always intentionally the simplest case.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#258

Post by nottorp »

cvwright wrote: post #53
NikolaNovak wrote: post #23

Beyond the slowing you to type, the key part of the good books was the considered and mindful order of presentation. This is what had me spending money when I could get the reference manual for free - a guide , a book that taught me unfamiliar concepts in top down fashion, and took some degree of responsibility to be both accessible and comprehensive. I love the tutoring of LLM, but to this day as a complement to a g…

Unfortunately even in the old days, a truly good programming book like you’re describing was depressingly rare. Younger me really enjoyed some of the game programming books by Andre Lamothe. Most “Learn Language X” books were terrible with over focus on syntax and very little thought into organization.

> Unfortunately even in the old days, a truly good programming book like you’re describing was depressingly rare.

And when you got past the beginner stuff, non existent.

I've randomly tried to improve my $LANGUAGE_I_ALREADY_SHIPPED_SOMETHING_IN knowledge across the years, but if you look at books there's a plateau, and it's not too high.

With the internet, there are random posts here and there with pieces of info that will help you improve yourself. But no books.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#259

Post by CM30 »

I mean, it's not just programming books. Books and magazines for a lot of specialist fields are on the way out, since the internet is just a more convenient option.

Look at video game or pop culture coverage for example. With a few specialist exceptions, no-ones reading print media for info on them anymore. Things like YouTube and social media and specialist websites are just a lot more practical and up to date.

I get that books make it easier to go slowly (or for writers to spend the time researching), but tech is just a fast moving field. By the time something is available in print form, it's probably already near irrelevant for work purposes.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#260

Post by Intermernet »

dd8601fn wrote: post #111
lmm wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was great 15 years ago before the Iron Law of Bureaucracy kicked in and the powermods took over.

Also it solved the Experts Exchange problem, which was an absolute cancer on the web for years before Stack Overflow destroyed them.

They originally didn't have a hyphen in the URL. No one called them Experts Exchange!
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