But that's not the problem we need to solve. All our programming languages are verbose and stupid. It takes too much effort to solve the problems we do in them.
We are solving a lot of mediocre problems and customers are impressed at that. But that's not the problem we need to solve. There are wars going on, and the climate is changing in undesirable ways, and we have no clue how to organize people, or how we could put modern technology to good use.
Division of labor is fine, I think it's a fairly unique attitude in tech that we have do something (tm) with our skills. No one asks the accountant to get out there and fix climate change.
But I do, friend, I really do.
It all starts with compassion; profit-motive being prioritized over compassion is the source of all this world's problems, from strife to pollution to fascism to oppression of minorities or other ethnic/religious groups.
Both political parties here in America are on the take from various moneyed groups, though the Dems have less disdain for the poor, to be certain. Their prioritization of those interests damages how our government behaves, how it should serve the people of both our country and the world at large.
And look at the fools who are about to run America now, as well as the majority of the commentariat around here, burning up the Earth for their "coins" and "near-worthless" LLMs, worshipping dangerous fools like Musk.
If you want to be a part of the solution, connect yourself with our Creator and learn how to become more compassionate, for EVERY SINGLE ONE of our problems is solely and completely due to a lack of compassion.
So, tech is great to help people but can be (and is being) used to oppress others (e.g. rent collusion), amplify mis- and disinformation, cheat consumers, and so on and so on.
Steel yourself in compassion for all innocent human beings, i.e. the ones not oppressing others and destroying the Earth.
The solution is to stop drinking.
How to succeed in making that solution happen is a separate problem, but the first step in solving any and every problem is identifying its root causes.
For our world, not understanding that compassion must be the fundamental factor under consideration is the primary problem. Once that essential fact is understood, we can then haggle out the solution, but not before then.
With love, all things are possible, if we so choose.
I do have some doubts though -- concepts such as compassion and love have been around since, and even before, Christ and Buddha. I don't necessarily see these concepts as being a robust solution though. Bad things keep popping up again and again, and not everyone is equally well off.
And even that's not true much of the time.
We are solving a lot of mediocre problems that product owners and shareholders are impressed at.
We can do a lot better. More time solving problems, less time satisfying what is effectively a trite extrapolation of theoretical languages from the 60s
I get tired of folks drawing boxes and arrows and waving their hands about their designs. I ask for proof that it works they way they say it does and I get nothing.
People seem to like GenAI tools because they can avoid doing the work and get the results. It's like having a genie or a monkey's paw... with similar consequences.
If you don't understand the concurrency problems before you're not going to understand them by staring hard at the code that a chatbot generated.
Sometimes you can get the job done by using a tool like a genie, and that’s awesome (it’s the goal of abstractions IMO). Sometimes you can’t.
You don't always need exhaustive "proof that it works" other than running the thing and looking at the output.
If you can get the job done with an LLM without understanding the code it wrote, then that's awesome. I've seen it multiple times with non-technical people who just want to do some small thing with a Python script. They solve their problem, send their report/email, and move on.
I don’t think anyone would find fault with this argument. People who are wary of LLMs, including myself, are in fact wary of lazyness. Getting the (current?) job done is only a small part of building a system. The fact is you have to maintain it or extract the embodied knowledge later, and that’s where no thought have not been given.
In the Tidy First? book by Kent Beck, he explains that the value of software is both in its current behavior and the future possibilities that the structure provides. If there’s no future to worry about, LLMs may be a valuable tool.
The conversation in this thread was about how LLMs will change software engineering as a profession tho...
Or where possible, the selection of an extant DSL?
Besides, how do you even check the result now without running untrusted code? Every run of the model you need to reverse-engineer the binary?
The hype around LLMs come from the fact that you can command them in natural language. To make it possible, LLMs have to be trained mostly on natural language corpus. And human-readable code is closer to natural language than binary code.
First, a model that produces binary code would be impossible to vet. This is already an issue with "trusting trust" in compilers [1], and would be made worse in the case of companies that constantly tweak their black-box models however they like. At least my compiler can work offline.
But then there's the idea of programming as "turn data into data" that forgets that software has to interface with humans too. If I ask my LLM to give me sentencing guidelines that are "fair" given a set of parameters, no one on Earth should trust a binary they cannot check themselves. In fact, those affected may even have a constitutional right to source code.
Or to take it further, you hire a consultant to produce some work in a given amount of time. You accept the work over time, you don’t feel the need to ask the consultant to turn over all their notes or to plug their brain into a mind reader machine to vet the source. They could indeed be lying and take whatever they learned about your company elsewhere, but we have no protection over that possibility lacking a mind reading instrument today. And society also doesn’t collapse today given that risk.