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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Slowly it is going to be only skills.md.

I agree with the sentiment, I really like D and find a missing opportunity that it wasn't taken off regarding adoption.

Most of what made D special in D is nowadays partially available in mainstream languages, making the adoption speech even harder, and lack of LLM training data doesn't help either.

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> lack of LLM training data doesn't help either.

That shouldn't stop any self-respecting programmer.

Nor does it stop self-respecting LLMs.

Self-respecting programmers write assembly for the machines they built themselves. I swear, kids these days have no respect for the craft

Exactly. We wrote code before LLMs and we can after their advent too

Yeah, that is why carpenters are still around and no one buys Ikea.

Is your proposition that programmers are now incapable of writing code?

Eventually yes, when incapable becomes a synonymous with finding a job in an AI dominated software factory industry.

Enterprise CMS deployment projects have already dropped amount of assets teams, translators, integration teams, backend devs, replaced by a mix of AI, SaaS and iPaaS tools.

Now the teams are a fraction of the size they used to be like five years ago.

Fear not, there will be always a place for the few ones that can invert a tree, calculate how many golf balls fit into a plane, and are elected to work at the AI dungeons as the new druids.

Same for ERP/CRM/HRM and some financial systems ; all systems that were heavy 'no-code' (or a lot of configuration with knobs and switches rather than code) before AI are now just going to lose their programmers (and the other roles); the business logic / financial calcs etc were already done by other people upfront in excel, visio etc ; now you can just throw that into Claude Code. These systems have decades of rigid code practices so there is not a lot of architecting/design to be done in the first place.

While I don't share this cynical worldview, I am mildly amused by the concept of a future where, Warhammer 40,000 style, us code monkeys get replaced by tech priests who appease the machine gods by burning incense and invoking hymns.

Nick Offerman wants to have a word with you. Given the choice of building my own furniture and things or IKEA and I had the skills I’d go the build it myself route. It’s doable. It was before. And it still is. All we got now is super duper capable auto correct and text completion. Use it for what it is. Don’t let it replace you.

An actor, that happens do carpentry as hobby.

s/Nick Offerman/any talented carpenter.... you missed the point, though

> that is why carpenters are still around and no one buys Ikea

The irony in this statement is hilarious, and perfectly sums up the reality of the situation IMO.

For anyone who doesn't understand the irony: a carpenter is someone who makes things like houses, out of wood. They absolutely still fucking exist.

Industrialised furniture such as IKEA sells has reduced the reliance on a workforce of cabinet makers - people who make furniture using joinery.

Now if you want to go ask a carpenter to make you a table he can probably make one, but it's going to look like construction lumber nailed together. Which is also quite a coincidence when you consider the results of asking spicy autocomplete to do anything more complex than auto-complete a half-written line of code.

I think you have misunderstood what a carpenter is. A carpenter is someone who makes wooden furniture (among other things).

> I think you have misunderstood what a carpenter is. A carpenter is someone who makes wooden furniture (among other things).

I think _you_ have misunderstood what a carpenter is. At least where I live, you might get a carpenter to erect the wood framing for a house. Or build a wooden staircase. Or erect a drywall. I'm sure most carpenters worth their salt could plausibly also make wooden furniture, at an exorbitant cost, but it's not at all what they do.

I sanity checked with Wiktionary, and it agrees: "A person skilled at carpentry, the trade of cutting and joining timber in order to construct buildings or other structures."

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/carpente...

a person whose job is making and repairing wooden objects and structures

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpentry

Carpenters make many things besides houses.

See the section "Types of carpentry".

These guys made one of the most amazing tables for someone I know: https://rustictradesfurniture.com/. If you said "you're not a carpenter because you aren't slapping 2x4s together", you'd get a wry chuckle that means 'who is this idiot'.

> Yeah, that is why carpenters are still around and no one buys Ikea.

I'm sorry, what? Are you suggesting that Ikea made carpenters obsolete? It's been less than 6 months since last I had a professional carpenter do work in my house. He seemed very real. And charged very real prices. This despite the fact that I've got lots of Ikea stuff.

Compared to before, not a lot of carpenters/furniture makers are left. This is due to automation.

> Compared to before, not a lot of carpenters/furniture makers are left.

Which is it? Carpenters or furniture makers? Because the two have nothing in common beyond the fact that both professions primarily work with wood. The former has been unaffected by automation – or even might plausibly have more demand due to the overall economic activity caused by automation! The latter certainly has been greatly affected.

The fact that people all over the thread are mixing up the two is mindboggling. Is there a language issue or something?

There is a language issue: carpenter is used as synonym of woodworker. It's like someone who doesn't know anything about computers using the term 'memory' to mean storage rather than working memory (i.e. RAM).

From the context it was pretty obvious what the original poster meant, as long as you charitably interpret their message. As per the site guidelines.

Nah, IKEA has replaced moving furniture with throwing it away and rebuying it. Prior to IKEA hiring a carpenter was also something that is done a few times in a lifetime/century. If anything it has commodized creating new furniture.

Self respecting developers are an endangered species, otherwise we would not have so much Electron crap.

Those that learn to do robot maintenance, are the ones left at the factory.

My experience is that all LLMs that I have tested so far did a very good job producing D code.

I actually think that the average D code produced has been superior to the code produced for the C++ problems I tested. This may be an outlier (the problems are quite different), but the quality issues I saw on the C++ side came partially from the ease in which the language enables incompatible use of different features to achieve similar goals (e.g. smart_ptr s new/delete).

I work with D and LLMs do very well with it. I don't know if it could be better but it does D well enough. The problem is only working on a complex system that cannot all be held in context at once.

I based my opinion on this recent thread, https://forum.dlang.org/thread/bvteanmgrxnjiknrkeyg@forum.dl...

Which the discussion seems to imply it kind of works, but not without a few pain points.

The complaints are against the open-weight LLMs, I didn't try them much. I do use mostly Claude as that's what the company is paying for. They don't pay for laptops with GPUs or locally hosted LLMs to test those.

It's not like it knows perfect D, it does make mistakes and I don't work on a C++ or Rust project to compare its behavior. Generating templates from scratch is a bit of a challenge but given we have plenty of examples in our code with some prodding it manages to write well enough.

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