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Will humans write code in 2040?

arxiv.org

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Re: Will humans write code in 2040?

#31

Post by cjalmeida »

ggm wrote: post #20

Feels like one of those particular/general cases. In particular, few people routinely code in assembler any more. I imagine you can do degree-level courses in "computing" which don't even go there. I know you can do courses with no VLSI or microelectronics, both of which were required subjects on many courses at one point. So yes, in particular terms, we don't do things which machines (programming language compilers,…

One thing I can see happening is assisted UI design for websites. A lot of manpower today is spent going from PSDs or wireframes to HTML/CSS.

It's quite feasible to give a sketch, with some style transfer have an AI output decent HTML and even some scaffolding for your JS framework of choice.

Re: Will humans write code in 2040?

#32

Post by filleokus »

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #28
filleokus wrote: post #27

Fundamentally, 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.)

Yeah, of course. It's what I do mostly these days. As mentioned in other threads, some people still work at much lower abstraction level, and even hand optimise stuff that is really critical and can't be left to a stupid compiler.

But isn't the trend with larger (/ "more useful") abstractions spreading even outside the sphere of web stuff? I'm thinking about stuff like game engines, ML frameworks or all the standard libraries for mobile plattforms.

I would really like to know how the life of a network card firmware developer is like, or writing drivers for graphics cards, or software in highly reliable systems like cars or something. I guess their work is quite different from mine.

Re: Will humans write code in 2040?

#33

Post by malux85 »

greenhouse_gas wrote: post #29
malux85 wrote: post #12

Earlier 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.

>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.

Yeah, I imagine the formal logic being quite strict, maybe requiring formal verification. It wont stop business-leaky-cases, but it might give us something deterministic that is better than what we have - we dont need perfection, an order of magnitude (or 5) jump in productivity would do...

Re: Will humans write code in 2040?

#34

Post by cjalmeida »

userbinator wrote: post #17

that machines, instead of humans, will write most of their own code by 2040 Regardless of whether it actually happens, a future where humans can no longer have meaningfully detailed control over what machines do (to them), sounds extremely dystopian and certainly much sci-fi has been based on that vision, so I hope it doesn't happen...

This already happens. Compilers and interpreters hide most of the details.

Unless you're writing embedded code you usually don't have a say in a lot of what's going on. Things like memory allocation, scheduling, interrupts, addressing.

Things like kubernetes takes this even further.

Re: Will humans write code in 2040?

#35

Post by skywhopper »

Turns out, machines already do write most or really all of the “code” and we use higher level more human-like languages to tell magic programs what code to generate. Those magic programs are called compilers and interpreters, and they already do a lot to protect humans from the extreme heterogeneity of hardware.

Re: Will humans write code in 2040?

#38

Post by didibus »

vadimberman wrote: post #3

I 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 agree with you. That said, I can see how AI could be leveraged to generate implementation of highly precise specs. Code would probably evolve to be more about defining desired behavior, very formally, and AI could possibly build the implementation of it. I suspect this would be at the function level first, or unit, like maybe a set of data and a few functions over the data. You could describe clearly the expected behavior, in a formal language, and then AI could write a highly optimized implementation of it.

Now, would this be just as tedious? Would it make coding any faster? Dunno. Maybe the coding of the spec would be almost harder, and a bad spec would still result in bugs in the code.

Re: Will humans write code in 2040?

#39

Post by vadimberman »

didibus wrote: post #38
vadimberman wrote: post #3

I 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 agree with you. That said, I can see how AI could be leveraged to generate implementation of highly precise specs. Code would probably evolve to be more about defining desired behavior, very formally, and AI could possibly build the implementation of it. I suspect this would be at the function level first, or unit, like maybe a set of data and a few functions over the data. You could describe clearly the expected b…

> I can see how AI could be leveraged to generate implementation of highly precise specs

Interesting idea - maybe as a draft.

But keep in mind that people have been chasing this target for decades. SQL was supposed to be a language so close to English that business people could use it. Wizards and templates were supposed to eliminate the need for hand-coding. 10 years ago I was advised to learn UML or prepare for extinction.

All they've achieved is the explosion in the number of programmers.

Re: Will humans write code in 2040?

#40

Post by mythrwy »

In the future humans won't have write code because machines will do it all.

So all that will be left for humans is set up configs like webpack. This will take a tremendous amount of time and effort. So there will be a huge demand for configers. And thus configer bootcamps and Medium articles on how there is so much sexism in the configing industry and others bemoning the prevelence of config-bros.

Sarcasm aside, at the end of the day someone has to tell a machine what is wanted. Unless machines get much smarter and they aren't about to get that smart any time soon near as I can tell. Those someones are called programmers.

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