Comment by zoogeny | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zoogeny | Hacker News Reader

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> your larger point which seems to be that all greenfield projects are necessarily best suited to low level language

That is not my intention. Perhaps you are reading absolutes and chasing after black and white statements. When I say "it makes me think I should ..." I am not saying: "Everyone everywhere should always under any circumstances ...". It is a call to question the assumption, not to make emphatic universal decisions on any possible project that could ever be conceived. That would be a bad faith interpretation of my post. If that is what you are arguing against, consider if you really believe that is what I meant.

So my point stands: I am going to consider this more deeply rather than default assuming that an interpreted scripting language is suitable.

> Low level languages tend to have a higher barrier to entry,

I almost think you aren't reading my post at this point and are just arguing with a strawman you invented in your head. But I am assuming good faith on your part here, so once again I'll just repeat myself again and again: LLMs have already changed the barrier to entry for low-level languages and they will continue to do so.

> That is not my intention. Perhaps you are reading absolutes and chasing after black and white statements.

The first comment I wrote in this thread was a response to the following quote: "Yet projects inevitably get to the stage where a more native representation wins out." Inevitable means impossible to evade. That's about as close to a black and white statement as possible. You're also completely ignoring the substance of my argument and focusing on the wording. My point is that language rewrites (like the TS rewrite that sparked this discussion) are a faulty indicator of scripting language quality.

> I almost think you aren't reading my post at this point and are just arguing with a strawman you invented in your head. But I am assuming good faith on your part here, so once again I'll just repeat myself again and again: LLMs have already changed the barrier to entry for low-level languages and they will continue to do so.

And I've already said that I disagree with this assertion. I'll just quote myself in case you haven't read through all my comments: "I'm not an AI pessimist, but I'm also not an AI maximalist who is convinced that AI will completely eliminate the need for human code authoring and review, and as long as humans are required to write and review code, then those benefits [of scripting languages] still apply." I was under the impression that I didn't have to keep restating my position.

I don't believe that AI has eroded the barriers of entry to the point where the average Ruby or PHP developer will enjoy passing around memory allocators in Zig while writing API endpoints. Neither of us can be 100% certain about what the future holds for AI, but as someone else pointed out, making technical decisions in the present based on AI speculation is a gamble.

Ah, now we're at the dictionary definition level. So let's check Google:

    Inevitable:
          as is certain to happen; unavoidably.
       informal
          as one would expect; predictably.
          "inevitably, the phone started to ring just as we sat down"

Which interpretation of the word is "good faith" considering the rest of my post? If I said "If you drink and drive you will inevitably get into an accident" - would you argue against that statement? Would you argue with Google and say "I have sat down before and the phone didn't ring"?

It is Hacker News policy and just good internet etiquette to argue with good faith in mind. I find it hard to believe you could have read my entire post and come away with the belief of absolutism.

edit: Just to add to this, your interpretation assumes I think Django (the Python web application framework) will unavoidably be rewritten in a lower level language. And Ruby on Rails will unavoidably be rewritten. Do you believe that is what I was saying? Do you believe that I actually believe that?

I wrote 362 words on why language rewrites are a faulty indicator of language quality with multiple examples and anecdotes, and you hyper-fixated on the very first sentence of my comment, instead of addressing the substance of my claim. In what alternate universe is that a good faith argument? If you were truly arguing in good faith you'd restate your position in whichever way you'd like your argument represented, and then proceed to respond to something besides the first sentence. Regardless of how strongly or weakly you believe that "native representations win out", my argument about misusing language rewrite anecdata still stands, and it would have been far more productive to respond to that point.

> If I said "If you drink and drive you will inevitably get into an accident" - would you argue against that statement?

If we were having a discussion about automobile safety and you wrote several hundred words about why a specific type of accident isn't indicative of a larger trend, I wouldn't respond by cherry picking the first sentence of your comment, and quoting Google definitions about a phone ringing.

You said: "Inevitable means impossible to evade. That's about as close to a black and white statement as possible."

I used Google to point out that your argument, which hinged on your definition of what the word "inevitable" means is the narrowest possible interpretation of my statement. An interpretation so narrow that it indicates you are arguing in bad faith, which I believe to be the case. You are accusing me of making an argument that I did not make by accusing me of not understanding what a word means. You are wrong on both accounts as demonstrated.

The only person thinking in black in white is the figment of me in your imagination. I've re-read the argument chain and I'm happy leaving my point where it is. I don't think your points, starting with your attempt at a counter example with Prisma, nor your exceptional compiler argument, nor any of the other points you have tried support your case.

> which hinged on your definition of what the word "inevitable" means is the narrowest possible interpretation of my statement.

My argument does not hinge upon the definition of the word inevitable. You originally said "I mean, I can't think of a time a high profile project written in a lower level representation got ported to a higher level language."

I gave a relatively thorough accounting of why you've observed this, and why it doesn't indicate what you believe it to indicate here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43339297

Instead of addressing the substance of the argument you focused on this introductory sentence: "I'd like to address your larger point which seems to be that all greenfield projects are necessarily best suited to low level languages."

Regardless of how narrowly or widely you want me to interpret your stance, my point is that the data you're using to form your opinion (rewrites from higher to lower level languages) does not support any variation of your argument. You "can't think of a time a high profile project written in a lower level representation got ported to a higher level language" because developers tend to be more hesitant about reaching for lower level languages (due to the higher barrier to entry), and therefore are less likely to misuse them in the wrong problem domain.

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