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.

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

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 In general I agree but the current state of everything-in-React means a 1k line change often makes sense at some level. It's horribly verbose, logically small changes make big diffs, the library ecosystem is full of half-baked projects, it's just a mess. Removing some of the friction to adding code makes it much worse, but it's not the only cause. Now, back to better dev tools, unfortunately Excel has somehow ended up being the go-to for a lot of the world. I dunno.

@mirth It's truly amazing what browsers are able to do now, but unfortunately that doesn't fix that JavaScript and the entire JavaScript ecosystem is a godawful mess

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.

@jonathanhogg HyperCard was great.

I've seen lots of posts in the last couple of days about how quickly one can write lots of code with AI. I feel perplexed by this as I hate large programs. The largest thing I have written in the last decade is Flitter. It's only 30k lines and I believe very strongly that it is. Still. Too. Big. Even there, I wrote it purposely to allow the stuff I write *in* it to be very smol: mostly no more than 100 lines. That is the maximum I want to write in a day.