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.
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@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
@jonathanhogg Browser engines are amazing. What we have is related to why Flash was never going to work for mobile. Nothing to do with the runtime, everything to do with the target most devs built for (desktop which 15 years ago was much faster than phones). Now half of web devs have Apple M series silicon which is twice or more as fast as most of the installed base of PCs. Whatever is just tolerably fast on a dev's machine is guaranteed to suck everywhere else. Sadness ensues.
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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 because the people pushing LLMs killed Flash to make room for LLMs
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@jonathanhogg HyperCard was great.
@StaceyCornelius @jonathanhogg is a descendants/replacement extant now?
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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.
@jonathanhogg I've spent the last decade writing about 50k lines of C++ and it's barely comprehensible to me. Despite regular bouts of significant refactoring and deleting, as old 'new and essential' functions turn out to never be used or the one user goes away.
I did point a downloadable LLM assistant at it but got nothing usable. I was half hoping for a "sure, I'll rewrite that into Rust for you" result
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@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.
@requiem @jonathanhogg don't forget COBOL and SQL, both invented so businesspeople could dispense with overpriced programmers and just talk to the machine directly.
Turns out that programming people is much easier than programming machines, or at least that yelling at the compiler about an error message is much less useful than yelling at subordinates.
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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 such a formative experience for me as a kid, I don’t think I would have ever gotten into programming without it
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@fozztexx @jonathanhogg there are quite a few, Lego even have a visual programming language for their smart bricks (I think Python is officially supported, unlike not quite C for Mindstorms).
There's also a visual language for a smart RC/drone controller built by that one guy
iforce2d is the guy.But they're generally hard to to anything nontrivial with and very hard to debug. Like Excel/Calc... so easy to have subtle errors even in simple programs that it's considered inevitable.
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@jonathanhogg No, it's still difficult to program something so that it's exactly how you want it to be. It's apparently been underestimated how often that doesn't matter ("mostly working app" where getting it to working is more effort than starting from scratch), but we will see how that develops in the long run. Maybe plausible deniability is really enough for many things.
Nobody is gatekeeping clear, testable requirements and communication without misunderstandings. People usually just can't do that.
@dasgrueneblatt @jonathanhogg I also build bicycles (and have worked in a bike shop), and it sometimes shocks me how closely it parallels software.
People who actually ride a bicycle more than once don't want "a bike, any bike", they want a bike that does X, Y, and Z. They often can't articulate that at the start, usually because they don't know it.
But once they ride for a bit they want a comfortable riding position, gears and brakes that work, mudguards, etc.
Just like software
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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. So I don't worry about us creating super-intelligent AI, I worry about us allowing that expertise to atrophy through laziness and greed. I refuse to use LLMs not because I'm scared of how clever they are, but because I do not wish to become stupider.
"AI is a genius on every subject except that one thing you're extremely knowledgeable about."
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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. So I don't worry about us creating super-intelligent AI, I worry about us allowing that expertise to atrophy through laziness and greed. I refuse to use LLMs not because I'm scared of how clever they are, but because I do not wish to become stupider.
@jonathanhogg HyperCard wasn't my first programming/development experience*, but it was the one that galvanized the core of a coder within my being.
I wish I had kept The HyperCard Bible that the library had conveniently forgotten that I had on loan for years; heavily thumbed through and dog-eared.Even now I'm pressured to use LLMs to code with. "It's like having a hundred intern's work ready in seconds"... That's not the flex you think it is boss.
Your existing code is so tightly coupled and monolithic, no seperation of concerns, and a culture like a workaholic traveling rodeo show. An LLM looking at what you've got isn't going to produce Art of Code level advice... You're going to get 3am it complies finally, push to prod before it breaks advice.* it was the second
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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. So I don't worry about us creating super-intelligent AI, I worry about us allowing that expertise to atrophy through laziness and greed. I refuse to use LLMs not because I'm scared of how clever they are, but because I do not wish to become stupider.
@jonathanhogg And, fun fact, but the evidence we have so far is that dependance on LLM's does legit harm your cognitive abilities.
As someone who actually builds things, I have to understand how they work, not ask the magic box to build them for me and hope against hope they actually function.
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@eschaton It looks cute, though curious to build such a faithful homage but ditch the most interesting thing about HyperCard – the HyperTalk language
@jonathanhogg I think the author would disagree that HyperTalk was the most interesting thing about HyperCard, especially since they put a lot of work into crafting a language they feel is comfortable for such a use. (At least they didn’t just use JS or Lua…)
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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@mastodon.social Wow—I will be borrowing that lovely phrase “planet boiling roulette wheel.” That sums it up so well!
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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. So I don't worry about us creating super-intelligent AI, I worry about us allowing that expertise to atrophy through laziness and greed. I refuse to use LLMs not because I'm scared of how clever they are, but because I do not wish to become stupider.
@jonathanhogg Excellent thread.
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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.
@jonathanhogg apparently I vigorously agreed four days prior https://mastodon.social/@glyph/116072915065555041
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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 The reason we don't have HyperCard and the reason ppl think slop coding is productive are one in the same: bad language & framework design imposing ridiculous amounts of boilerplate code on everything. This both makes it hard for beginners to do anything and makes it so there's a lot of "work" (busy work) that a sloppy pattern copying machine can do decently well at.
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@StaceyCornelius @jonathanhogg is a descendants/replacement extant now?
@Photo55 @StaceyCornelius @jonathanhogg Livecode is sort of descended from a Hypercard clone (https://livecode.com). And there are a number of runtime engines for old-school Hypercard decks (https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks?&sort=-downloads). There’s also Decker, which is a spiritual inheritor (https://beyondloom.com/decker/).
Dang I miss Hypercard.
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@jonathanhogg @michael @jarkman I once asked a very senior HPC developer at Red Hat what keeps him up at night and he said, paraphrasing and pulling from memory that's about 15 years old now, "we haven't created new computer science since the 1960s and I fear we'll exhaust what we know before we discover anything new," and I think about that a lot these days.
@thatsten
The 1960s were mostly math because most CS was done on blackboards (as one of my profs put it) because access to machines was very limited. Also, there was a "Cambrian explosion" of ideas in this new field - and after that, evolution slowed down. -
@michael @jarkman @jonathanhogg (IMO) we can't have more DSLs because everything useful is now plumbed together from a series of heterogenous parts and we've somehow decided they can only interoperate at the (barbaric) C ABI level, or the (absurdly inefficient) web level. So, we rely on general purpose languages using specialised libraries, instead of the other way around.
I think fixing this boundary/contract problem would fix a lot in s/w engineering.@tobyjaffey
gRPC is pretty efficient, although Erlang is a better abstraction. -
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.
Heap of 10K lines and they probably have NO idea what is even going on in there.
