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Comment by v3xro | Hacker News Reader

> If I can somehow hate a machine that has basically stopped me from having to write boring boilerplate code, of course others are going to hate it!

Poor author, never tried expressive high-level languages with metaprogramming facilities that do not result in boring and repetitive boilerplate.

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The rule of metaprogramming is that it ends up just as convoluted and full of edge cases as regular code, just without a nice way to debug. The rule is also that it always seems like a fantastic idea at first and will solve so many isues.

I've been programming since 1994. I've seen a lot. I almost always end up despising any metaprogramming system and wish we'd just kept things simpler even if it meant boilerplate.

Honestly, this. The mainstream coding culture has spent decades dealing with shoehorning stateful OOP into distributed and multithreaded contexts. And now we have huge piles of code, getters and setters and callbacks and hooks and annotation processers and factories and dependency injection all pasted on top of the hottest coding paradigm of the 90's. It's too much to manage, and now we feel like we need AI to understand it all for us.

Meanwhile, nobody is claiming vast productivity gains using AI for Haskell or Lisp or Elixir.

I mean, I find that LLMs are quite good with Lisp (Clojure) and I really like the abstraction levels that it provides. Pure functions and immutable data mean great boundary points and strong guarantees to reason about my programs, even if a large chunk of the boring parts are auto-coded.

I think there's lots of people like me, it's just that doing real dev work is orthogonal (possibly even opposed) to participating in the AI hype cycle.

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