I don't really agree that code is superhuman if VERY few is able to understand it haha..! Code should complex but easy to follow to make it brilliant in my opinion
A more optimistic take is that maybe such tools will let us write competent code in languages we do NOT specialize in, and in the future either a more competent version of ourselves or some actual expert can fix it if it breaks? That doesn't sound a whole lot better :/
The pessimistic and more likely outcome is that people just want shit done and so they will slap any half working garbo together as they have done for the last 20 years I have been in the industry.
Writing replaceable code instead of maintainable code seems to be already working for a lot of projects. With LLMs and all that fast computing we have it seems it will be more of replaceable code in the future.
Of course there are always projects where it will never work.
It already works for infrastructure as nowadays servers are not fixed and treated like important things but you spin up fresh one.
I contend that these two concepts aren't different. If you have the ability to easily replace a small part of the code and have everything still work, then that's very maintainable. Unless you are talking about throwing out the whole codebase and replacing it, which for sufficiently complex codebases will inevitably lead to the second system effect. If replacing the whole thing is easy, it was probably not that valuable or complex to begin with, but that's not the kind of code where maintainability is paramount.
> It already works for infrastructure as nowadays servers are not fixed and treated like important things but you spin up fresh one.
For that metaphor to work, the programmer would have to be patching the binary output instead of fixing the source code and recompiling.
Yes I think even as far as 70%-80% of code - IMHO - is not complex/valuable.
Most of code is replaceable CRUD not controls systems for flying and landing Falcon 9. So it is people problem not a technical problem, people pretend that they need "button more to the left and different shade" just to feel more important. Where we end up with loads of systems that do slightly different thing.
When I say valuable, I mean provides value to a business. When I say complex, I mean not buttons on a form.
That's not even remotely like how rewriting code works. Rewriting code is more comparable to what spinning up a fresh server was like a quarter century ago. So, back in the days where they were important things because spinning up a new one was an unholy PITA and literally never went off without a hitch.
Though I would say that ‘very few’ is a larger group than they think - there are plenty of people doing metatype programming in TS; I’ve dabbled enough that given the problem I could probably tackle it and I know I learned from seeing others do it (because I am far from a typescript professional). So it’s not ‘superhuman’ if many of the humans who have found themselves wanting to work with the typescript type derivation model could have written it.
These capabilities - type ternaries and inferred type parameters - were put into TypeScript with a view that humans would use them.
The danger here is kidding yourself that this sort of code is beyond human.
Are you looking at the same code I'm looking at? The first block of code from the article?
I've seen more readable code in Perl Golf competitions.
Here’s (https://github.com/unional/type-plus/blob/main/packages/type...) a human written example that’s well-factored and uses loads of subtypes to clarify what it’s doing - but it’s still going to read like the black tongue of Mordor to you if you’re not familiar with how this kind of type stuff is structured and used.
And factoring all that stuff out may help readability but it doesn’t help comprehension - try and trace what the actual underlying type definitions for some of those utility types like IdentityEqual<> are actually doing (look at https://github.com/unional/type-plus/blob/main/packages/type...) and realize the rabbit hole runs deep in this stuff.
Single-letter variable names, ternary operators and long run-on lines, like salt, are delicious in small quantities. But when you're writing code so complicated you need multiple comments, within a single statement?
I appreciate that you've got to piss with the cock you've got. I've certainly done things with C++ template metaprogramming, with perl, with TLA+ and with bash that I'm not proud of. But the fact the tool forces me to write something unclear doesn't mean I'm not writing something unclear.
I mention it only because certain parts of the experience shared the maths-looking big-sequence-of-ands-and-ors one sometimes sees when dealing with complex type systems. TLA+, very sensibly, lets you break up complex statements into multiple smaller statements and give them names.
I was simulating the behaviour of two ends of a communication channel which had been designed with a bidirectional message number/acknowledge/timeout/resend mechanism. And both a hardware and a software state machine on each end managing the message queue in each direction.
The experience was in equal parts brilliant and frustrating. Brilliant because it did reveal faults in the design that probably couldn't have been found any other way. Frustrating because (for example) if you represent your timeout mechanism as a counter on each end of the link and which can only count from 0 to 2 the check will succeed in a few seconds. But if you change the timeout behaviour to count from 0 to 10 the check will take a lot longer. I don't know exactly how long because I aborted the run after a week. And there was no real indication of precisely why it'd stopped completing - I basically had to undo my changes one line at a time until I figured out what was going on.
TLA+ also seemed to have some sort of TeX integration. So a lot of the documentation is written in TeX - it's a fine way of writing math I'm sure. But sometimes the documentation told you how to do something and showed an example statement with a dot, yet you couldn't copy-and-paste the example from the documentation into your code, to express it in your source code you had to use something like \cdot or \circ instead.
Interesting stuff to try out for sure. And impressive given the size of the team that works on it, which I gather is tiny.
Then that is an argument to do less of it. Or at least to back off and learn to write better types that are not a mess.
Which is impressive, generally reading code is considered harder than reading it so in that sense it is inhuman.