My experience with generative-AI has been that, at its very best, it is subtly wrong in ways that only an expert in the relevant subject would recognise.

@jonathanhogg Thanks! I'll absorb that and then I can ask you better questions at EMF.

@jonathanhogg .. great talk!

We seem to have largely stopped innovating on trying to lower barriers to programming in favour of creating endless new frameworks and libraries for a vanishingly small number of near-identical languages. It is the mid-2020s and people are wringing their hands over Rust as if it was some inexplicable new thing rather than a C-derivative that incorporates decades old type theory. You know what I consider to be genuinely ground-breaking programming tools? VisiCalc, HyperCard and Scratch.

@jonathanhogg Rust does fundamentally rely on advances in type theory that weren't there until 2010s, so I don't think this is a fair characterization of it

@jonathanhogg Rust does fundamentally rely on advances in type theory that weren't there until 2010s, so I don't think this is a fair characterization of it

I will say one thing for generative AI: since these tools function by remixing/translating existing information, that vibe programming is so popular demonstrates a colossal failure on the part of our industry in not making this stuff easier. If a giant ball of statistics can mostly knock up a working app in minutes, this shows not that gen-AI is insanely clever, but that most of the work in making an app has always been stupid. We have gatekeeped programming behind vast walls of nonsense.

I will say one thing for generative AI: since these tools function by remixing/translating existing information, that vibe programming is so popular demonstrates a colossal failure on the part of our industry in not making this stuff easier. If a giant ball of statistics can mostly knock up a working app in minutes, this shows not that gen-AI is insanely clever, but that most of the work in making an app has always been stupid. We have gatekeeped programming behind vast walls of nonsense.

@whitequark Heh! I honestly expected to get more pushback on the Rust quip . I don't mean to ding on it in particular, I actually like Rust a lot. Introducing the borrow checker as a type-theoretic way of doing formal proof of memory safety is genuinely great, but algebraic types and protocols go way, way back.

@jonathanhogg I very much agree with that! at the time Rust was a tiny little language with a lot of promise I was heavily using OCaml, which is nearly as old as C, and a lot of what I like about Rust is just that it finally brings those decades old techniques into the mainstream. I think this is in itself a valuable achievement!

the other thing about Rust is that it does make systems programming more accessible by giving you lots of guardrails in the trodden path. it is not only focused on that and you could argue it's not even primarily focused on that, but I think it's a very important aspect of it that allows a lot of people to do things they'd otherwise be afraid of.

I also think it's useful to say "accessible to whom?". in my description above, the unstated part was "makes system programming accessible to developers with experience in different domain", but this is very different from "makes programming accessible to people who do not think of themselves and do not want to be 'developers'" which as I understand is more what interests you

@whitequark yes! Rust totally makes accessible a lot of previously esoteric type theory to people who are programming at a low enough level that they probably should be using it. But even as someone who lives for this sort of shit, it’s too low level for 95% of what I want to be doing day to day

@jonathanhogg this is my central response to the "AI makes software development accessible" argument.

Once upon a time anyone could program their personal computer using a book that came with it. We taught it to all the kids in my tiny town's elementary school. My shopkeep neighbor and our local mechanic wrote their own custom software with no CS background.

BASIC, Hypercard, personal computers, printed manuals > LLM's.

I will say one thing for generative AI: since these tools function by remixing/translating existing information, that vibe programming is so popular demonstrates a colossal failure on the part of our industry in not making this stuff easier. If a giant ball of statistics can mostly knock up a working app in minutes, this shows not that gen-AI is insanely clever, but that most of the work in making an app has always been stupid. We have gatekeeped programming behind vast walls of nonsense.

You know what? HyperCard was a glorious moment in time that I dearly miss: an army of non-experts were bashing together and sharing weird and wonderful stacks that were part 'zine, part adventure game and part database. Instead of laughing at vibe-coders, maybe we should ask ourselves why the current state-of-the-art in beginner-friendly programming tools is a planet-boiling roulette wheel.

You know what? HyperCard was a glorious moment in time that I dearly miss: an army of non-experts were bashing together and sharing weird and wonderful stacks that were part 'zine, part adventure game and part database. Instead of laughing at vibe-coders, maybe we should ask ourselves why the current state-of-the-art in beginner-friendly programming tools is a planet-boiling roulette wheel.

@requiem @jonathanhogg I am old enough to remember the days before gcc when I wanted to learn how code everyone laughed and said first I'd need $500 for a copy of the Borland C compiler. It wasn't until linux became popular that I actually had a way to compile my C programs.

You know what? HyperCard was a glorious moment in time that I dearly miss: an army of non-experts were bashing together and sharing weird and wonderful stacks that were part 'zine, part adventure game and part database. Instead of laughing at vibe-coders, maybe we should ask ourselves why the current state-of-the-art in beginner-friendly programming tools is a planet-boiling roulette wheel.

To me, all these people crowing about having written 10k lines of code in a day are idiots. If you need to write that much code in a day, you are manifestly working at the wrong level of abstraction to solve your problem.

@jonathanhogg Have you seen Decker? It’s a lovely homage to HyperCard: https://beyondloom.com/decker/index.html

@skotchygut I'm pretty sure I still have a "backup copy" of Turbo C++ somewhere... @jonathanhogg