Why care about programming languages

Post by yuye » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 12:18 PM UTC

cubefox wrote: post #56

yuye wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's like an old ASM programmer telling himself that his obscure assembly knowledge will surely still give him great advantages as he is forced to switch to React.js development. The engineers that are truly skilled in writing pure assembly wouldn't be forced to switch to React. The existence of higher level languages doesn't mean lower level languages are useless.

I'm pretty sure that nowadays much less assembly is written than a few decades ago. Even video games used to be written in assembly. So the demand for assembly programmers went down, and the skill became less useful, unless the supply went down by the same amount.

Post by yuye » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 12:49 PM UTC

cubefox wrote: post #62

yuye wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, but that doesn't mean those assembly programmers are suddenly forced to write React. Being an expert at assembly probably means you're an expert in low level programming. We still have a need for those people, because they'll probably also be able to write C/C++/Rust/Zig/etc very competently. I consider myself pretty competent in C(And C++ to some degree), and I have a pretty good understanding of how c…

That's the thing with LLMs though. Assembly developers can switch to Rust or something like that. But LLMs probably write C or Go approximately as competently as they write Javascript. There is no commonly used language one could switch to which isn't automated yet.

Post by cubefox » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 2:55 PM UTC

yuye wrote: post #63

cubefox wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the thing with LLMs though. Assembly developers can switch to Rust or something like that. But LLMs probably write C or Go approximately as competently as they write Javascript. There is no commonly used language one could switch to which isn't automated yet.

That I disagree with, though. First of all, Go is a garbage collected language, so can't be compared to C. C is a language that is able to target basically every platform under the sun. It's versatile: User-space applications, kernel modules, and embedded firmware applications with an RTOS or even running on bare metal. LLMs can produce basic C code, but (still) struggle with more specialized tasks. They can be incre…

Post by geraneum » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 10:33 PM UTC

antonvs wrote: post #49

geraneum wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does the AI guess?

Using statistics. They’re probably better at it than we are.

Post by alpha_trion » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 10:02 PM UTC

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #6

alpha_trion wrote: post #2

I think a lot of folks in the industry are feeling this way. It’s an existential crisis for many of us right now. Why bother progressing when slop is “good enough”? Some of us still care but I have a feeling there are a lot of people that don’t.

There's very little evidence, if any, to suggest that slop is actually "good enough". I have interacted with multiple apps that clearly were written using AI by people who did not actually spend the time understanding what was made, and it most certainly was not an experience that I would classify as "good enough". I know this may be some kind of reverse survivorship bias and that I simply do not notice all of the sl…