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Comment by cestith | Hacker News Reader

Any software developer who hasn’t read _The Practice of Programming_ by Kernighan and Pike should. It’s not that long and much of it is timeless.

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Yeah, but I doubt many of the newer generation are going to read this. I manage a team of engineers, and one of the recent-ish graduates asked me in our 1-on-1 if it's still worth learning Python given that he can just write prompts. (Python is the language all our tools use).

If the next generation doesn't even want to learn a programming language, they're definitely not going to learn how to write _clean_ code.

Maybe I'm just overly pessimistic about junior engineers at the moment because of that conversation lol.

Junior here. There are still a few of us who value books and documentation. It's a weird time though. Hard to feel confident that you're learning in the correct way.

Anyway, I've found that if you want to get a coworker into reading technical books, the best way is with a novel or three. I've had good success with The Martian. The Phoenix Project might work too. Slip them fun books until they've built a habit and then drop The Mythical Man Month on them. :)

> Hard to feel confident that you're learning in the correct way.

This was hard before, too.

Here's my optimistic take: the fundamental things that spark joy about learning a novel algorithm, pattern, technique, etc. haven't gone anywhere, and there's no reason to think those things won't continue to be interesting. Furthermore, it seems like reading code isn't going anywhere too soon, and that definitely benefits from clean code. It follows that someone who can actually recognize clean from spaghetti, and tell the LLM to refactor it into XYZ style, is going to be relatively more valuable.

Random side note: my teen son has grown up with iPhone-level tech, yet likes and finds my old Casio F91 watch very interesting. I still have faith :)

In almost forty years of experience, the fraction of developers I've known who read in the field beyond what's strictly needed for their task is very small. I'm always delighted when I find one.

I obviously wasn't there, but it sounds like maybe they were asking for reassurance. There's a lot of people out there saying that LLMs are going to totally replace regular programming, and for a new grad who doesn't know much about the world, they value your expertise.

That's a positive interpretation. You might be right, either way that's what I pointed them to. I don't think the LLMs will really replace engineers in the foreseeable future, and so learning the languages and the fundamentals is still needed.

I have a laptop and a phone right here, right now. I have actual calculators around here somewhere. I’ve been out of schools for decades. I still can do arithmetic and basic algebra in my head or on paper and often do.

I’m hoping the situation with LLMs will be the same. Teach the basics and allow people to fall back on them for at least the simpler tasks for their lifetimes. I know people, by the way, who can still use an abacus and a slide rule. I can too, but with a refresher beforehand because I seldom use those.

IMO it is a valid question. Our AI has not yet reached that level, our prompts have not yet reached that level of sophistication. But I do not code in assembly any more, I do not do pointer arithmetic any more, so maybe some day we get to a state where we do not write python also. It is not going to be soon despite the AI bandwagon saying so, there are too many legacy pieces that are not documented well and not easy decipherable due to context window limits. But in 10 years ...maybe prompts is all we need.

PS: Not that we do not have people working at all levels of stack today, just that each level of stack, like a discussion going on today about python's JIT compiler will be a few (dozen or hundred) specialists. Everyone else can work with prompts.

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