The Future of Programming (2013) | Hacker News Reader

The Future of Programming (2013)

worrydream.com

39 pointsMattSayar10 comments

What speaks to me about this is how it was presented before LLMs, yet many concepts still apply. For example

> Learn tools, and use tools, but don't accept tools. Always distrust them; always be alert for alternative ways of thinking.

In his closing remarks he says, "The most dangerous thought you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you're doing," because you stop being open and receptive to new ways of thinking and doing things, much like programmers shunned FORTRAN because they were comfortable programming in binary.

Bret Victor Idealism is the antithesis of the horrible future that all the capital owners and at least half the programmers are preaching about now.

Programmers of assembly code (not binary) shunned FORTRAN? Got a source for that?

> FORTRAN was proposed by Backus and friends, and again was opposed by almost all programmers. First, it was said it could not be done. Second, if it could be done, it would be too wasteful of machine time and capacity. Third, even if it did work, no respectable programmer would use it -- it was only for sissies!

- Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering

In some sense... I bet there are more people writing assembly than FORTRAN today.

I'll take that bet.

Doubtful. Fortran is big in HPC and has modern versions.

That was obviously before FORTRAN existed.

Because, of course, Real Programmers use FORTRAN.

https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rni/papers/realprg.html

I considered the section about programs interrogating one another to accomplish some goal [0] the most evocative idea. I'll admit that my limited fantasies resembled something that resembled swagger's openapi or hateoas.

When I heard about Anthropic's model context protocol [1], it reminded me of this talk. I feel pretty skeptical that llm based systems are apt to craft a pigdin with a tool, as that seems like the kind of interaction that would use up lots of the context window. I'll grant that I've heard of people working around that by having their llm leave a summary of their session [2], to bootstrap the next, fresh session. I guess one could leave a pigdin dictionary that suited the llm traning data, as well.

[0] intro starts at 13:13, regarding arpanet, but description starts at 13:53

[1] https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/learn/architecture

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44661223

<edit to add> Also, Bret Victor's team was able to involve the light pens mentioned in his dynamicland research group / lab.

[3] https://dynamicland.org/archive/2015/Dynamic_Library

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