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Comment by OutOfHere | Hacker News Reader

This tactic won't work so well anymore in the age of LLMs. With the exception of horror movies like C and C++, is now very easy to learn and work with a new language by learning it on the go while working with it using an LLM. One can and should ask an LLM a dozen questions to explain what is happening. Expertise absolutely still matters, but less than it did before.

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It's always been pretty easy to learn any language "on the go" if dropped directly into a functioning codebase, with practical tasks to undertake in it. Even the "horror movie" languages you called out which obviously many many people have learned.

LLMs do make it easier, essentially by giving anyone the opportunity to to drop into a working codebase and take on practical tasks inside it.

I think 15 years ago I would have called out the imperative/functional divide as an exception, and that probably does still add challenge. But programming languages have progressed a lot, with imperative languages exposing you to a lot of functional concepts and functional languages having better ergonomics around state/IO.

Somehow I don't think you're going to be a candidate for Jane Street.

No, rather, Jane Street is not a candidate for me. Anyone who is actually smart can trade on their own and make a good living, and doesn't need to work for a company that does it. By corollary, anyone who works for someone else's trading firm is not actually so smart.

Or it just they didn't think they can make it on their own, so they didn't develop the necessary expertise.

LLM or not, most programmers cannot think straight. LLMs just lead to more false impressions of understanding. When LLMs become really good, they will refuse doing your work for you out of distaste.

LLMs are not so good at less popular languages. They know the basics but they also quickly get confused.

I think people are misunderstanding you to think using an LLM to generate code, whereas you’re discussing using an LLM to learn a language. LLMs can be teachers with infinite patience.

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