The Next Abstraction
substack.com
The Next Abstraction
1–10 of 21 posts
Re: The Next Abstraction
#2Spot on. New things will be possible. New things will be done. And so the wheel turns.
Re: The Next Abstraction
#3I think of Java as one of the earliest widely-accepted languages that introduced a lot of design patterns and language idioms that have become pretty much par for the course, since.
I never really liked it, but I see its influence in Swift, every day, and I do like Swift.
I think that we are at the "unlikable Java" stage of AI, right now. In a few years, we'll be seeing the next generation of tools, and they will be pretty cool.
And no, CEOs, you won't be able to fire all of your developers, and still stay in business. The developers will just have different tools at hand.
Re: The Next Abstraction
#4Spot on. New things will be possible. New things will be done. And so the wheel turns.
I don't know, feels kinda shallow as an argument.
For example it only works until the demand for (paid) software exceeds the offering.
Re: The Next Abstraction
#5I guess all vaguely bait-level articles will be about AI now.
Well, so much questionable here. First of all abstraction. Everything is an abstraction to programmers. It’s not, please. The author even was kind enough to contrast it with an old school bona fide abstraction. Garbage collection eliminates memory unsafety. You just don’t have to worry about it. That’s a real abstraction. It takes power away and streamlines the whole experience since you don’t have to worry about certain variables any more, they are just gone. What does AI do? It’s leverage. It might help you do things whatever factor of times faster that you insist. Completely unevenly. There is not one thing it reliably abstracts away. Please use precise words. You’re supposed to be technologists/technicians.
Then there’s the old looking to the past in order to lecture about what is hyped as completely unprecedented space-age technology. Okay to be honest this isn’t inconsistent if you merely think that AI is a great technology but not a revolution, not even a “silver bullet”. But anyway I see no reason to slavishly look to the past. The past is in fact tiny. WWII ended one person’s lifetime ago. How much oil was in the Earth 150 years ago? How much now? How reliably could you say that we could just expand economically forever 80 years ago? With climate change and whatnot, how is that looking right now?
Why not be a little cynical and pragmatic and consider that everything might not play out exactly like they did in a person’s lifetime kind of timespan. The worst could happen. What’s a billionaire with both a robot workforce and a robot army? That’s you getting discarded like the useful idiot that you are, or were. Just someone who dutifully built the whole world up for a little wage so that it could all be taken away.
Maybe you think economists are smart because they have quips against “finite piece of pie” so-called fallacies. Maybe you think that the best programmers are the ones who hustle along to the next paradigm, well those are after all the real go-getters, the ones who just get on with business. I think those are tunnel-visioned specialist fools.
Dig yourself into your specialist niche, aspire to be the hacker among hackers. Revel in embodying the values that only other members of your professional/hobbyist group respect. Meanwhile ignore the sharks of the world circling around you and get taken advantage of without any recourse or even notification.
Re: The Next Abstraction
#6I think of Java as one of the earliest widely-accepted languages that introduced a lot of design patterns and language idioms that have become pretty much par for the course, since. I never really liked it, but I see its influence in Swift, every day, and I do like Swift. I think that we are at the "unlikable Java" stage of AI, right now. In a few years, we'll be seeing the next generation of tools, and they will be…
But CEOs are putting a lot of money in AI and the books need to be balanced somehow.
Re: The Next Abstraction
#7Odd take, maybe the Java story made sense in say 2012 where everything would default to Java and you were building everything from a different abstraction. If you look at the past 15 years, the landscape has split into lower abstractions of C++ (Rust) for performance critical systems and some of the higher level abstractions split even to a higher level between Python, Go and others. Java is mostly missing in the AI/ML tidal wave. There is no neat - everyone moving to a higher abstraction - story.
Re: The Next Abstraction
#8> AI isn’t replacing us. It’s relieving us - of repetition, boilerplate, tedium.
My problem with current AI is that it isn't relieving us of boilerplate, it's making boilerplate cheaper to write. And when you make something cheaper, you get more of it! We already struggle as an industry with an overabundance of bad code. A fast bad-code generator might be a step towards a higher level of abstraction... but in the meantime it has more negative externalities than positive benefits.
Then again, the author lists "Java enterprise code" as a positive, so perhaps we just have fundamentally incompatible values and aesthetics.
Re: The Next Abstraction
#9I don't feel much inspired by the metaphor of garbage collection and AI.
Garbage collection makes thinking about memory irrelevant 99% of the time. Time saved with AI is spent figuring out what the AI did.
The garbage collector rarely makes itself a problem. AI almost always makes itself a problem.
Developers can go years without thinking about memory if they aren't in a complex environment. AI can't go a day without screwing up.
Garbage collection is very predictable. AI isn't.
Re: The Next Abstraction
#10> AI isn’t replacing us. It’s relieving us - of repetition, boilerplate, tedium. My problem with current AI is that it isn't relieving us of boilerplate, it's making boilerplate cheaper to write . And when you make something cheaper, you get more of it! We already struggle as an industry with an overabundance of bad code. A fast bad-code generator might be a step towards a higher level of abstraction... but in the me…
It's also making tests easier to write, though.