Well, my real name is Joseph Ottinger. I've been writing about "the enterprise" and Java since around 2000, as editor for TheServerSide.com, Java Developer Journal, and writing multiple books on Java, as well as writing Java code for a lot of people for, well, decades. Java's doing all right. Java's "immortality" is still in question; it might be the next COBOL, but I don't pretend to know the future and I can see a world in which something eats Java's lunch TOMORROW, although I don't know what that something is yet.
Totally fair, totally understood, such is life, which is why the very first paragraph says what the whole article then articulates in more detail. :D
I do this weird "tell people stuff up front" thing where I don't like clickbait titles, don't prefer the simple thing to the true thing, use opening paragraphs as actual theses - or close to it. If you read the first paragraph, you got the gist. The footnotes are footnotes because having interspersed aside text isn't convenient to write.
It's not flamebait - or "flamebate" - and I don't write "for favorable feedback." Did you not read the article? The author - me - actually means every word of it, including the bits about vocation and joy. Life is not single-dimensional, and neither is knowledge.
I code for fun and income. I don't stay at engagements where I can't invest personally in what I'm doing, and I don't hire people who don't enjoy what they're doing as they're doing it. Anything else feels punitive for everyone involved.
All of them are respectable. I've done most of those - Icon's new for me, and I don't think I've ever written anything in Ada either although I've come unfortunately close thanks to industrial requirements. I escaped!
And yes, awk is a programming language. And respectable. I tend not to use it much any more, but that's because there are other things that feel easier than remembering the syntax. C'est la vie.
Yeah, and I despise it. :D I purposefully expose the lede in my own articles early and often and as up front as I can make it - the editorial reviews keep saying "you should optimize for the clix, maing!" and ... no. If someone doesn't want to read the crap I come up with, I want them to know they don't want to read it right out of the gate, personally.
Totally fair, but as I mentioned elsewhere, I left a lot of languages out in my consideration even when they're on my CV. Heck, I work in Java in my day job - I'm taking time away from it to write this comment - and realized after I'd finished my third draft that I didn't mention it at all. And I DO Clojure, have done Ruby, have done Scala (and will never do so again if I have any choice in the matter).
I could have gone into each language as a sort of postmortem - even for the ones that aren't dead right now - but for every one of them there'd be a host of people saying "wait, you're wrong" and they'd be right, and maybe I would be in that host saying I was wrong at the same time. (Again, see the footnotes: it's right there!)
But the piece isn't abotu a postmortem analysis of whether a language is fun or not - what I enjoy isn't going to be what you enjoy, nor should it be, and I don't care what you use, as long as you use it well and for the benefit of mankind.
Yeah, definitely on point. I use AI for code generation, but I ride herd on it quite a lot and I limit scope viciously and with hard rules about what the models are even allowed to generate. It's worked out pretty well, but it's hardly the "oh send a question get a full system back" that people try to pretend it is.
Hmm. I find learning fun, no matter what the scope is - even Greek, which remains obscure to me. (Quick, ask me something about Greek! I'll nod wisely and stroke my chin in deep thought and then get distracted and wander elsewhere.) But you're not wrong: there's a fun discovery phase, then a "hey, does this actually work" phase, and then a "crap, I need to figure out how to MAKE it work" phase, all of which are decision points where one might choose to not bother.
Hey, I actually made a point out of laughing about it even as I wrote it - see the footnotes. Haskell's dedication is actually quite remarkable and respectable, and it's not "against success" but against trading "correctness" for "success."
I wrote that it was awkward because IMO it was. That is indeed "my opinion" - I found the language it used to express concepts far more useful than the language itself, and found myself writing C++ far more often than ever wanting to write ObjC.
Also, since I tend to loop back: yes, "fun" is subjective, and your points about Objective C and Pascal were actually mentioned directly in the footnotes, including the "false start" nomenclature, which came from Oram, not me, and I mentioned COBOL's specific remaining survival directly as well. Comments are always appreciated, of course, but they're best when they actually address the article they're commenting on instead of inferences. I get that the article's not short - I don't enjoy 300 word things that lack nuance - but even so.
I was programming computers in 1981. Pascal and COMAL were among my first structured languages. Your comment on the "naive opinion piece" is taken as it is offered, and I'm happy to offer you a full refund on your purchase price of the essay. :D
Note: am a head of engineering, and I've been writing code both as a vocation and a job for decades. I see it from a lot of sides; maybe not EVERY side, I'm not a machine (yet), but I don't think I have a singular myopic vision of ANY of it. YMMV.
Hah! SO MANY LANGUAGES got skipped, even from my own CV. I wanted to address Louis/II, for goodness' sake, but it's a CODASYL tool, and not a lot of people remember CODASYL from experience. (Nor should they: I liked it, but... nah, RDMS won for good reasons.)
Lisp is certainly fun, and it lives today and is influential today in multiple environments; I have a Clojure app I work on for my own amusement. And it does have commercial appeal, but it's limited; the three axis thing applies.
And yes, you're absolutely right. Apple is making a choice here, and they absolutely have impact on what the developers "get to use" - much as .Net succeeds largely to vendor choices on Windows, too. And developers get to suck it up! That's the three axis thing again: vocation, art, job. Swift and .Net both got a huge kick from the "job" department. That's how it goes.
Well, the problem here is in your own words: you say `My belief is` - and so it is. I cannot and would never presume to tell you what you believe. Yet I believe otherwise. Swift won on multiple axes; ObjC is still around but feels like legacy to me, much like Pascal does: influential (heck, I use ObjC terminology when describing OO concepts, over Smalltalk!) but not, like, a living language at this point even though its death might be, um, a lot more rumor than fact.
OP here: Fair. Yet I'd say that it's relatively rare (while being completely absent in my experience) that anyone would choose ObjC today - and the article even mentions Pascal as a stronger example of the model you use with ObjC. ObjC survives today, as does Pascal, but its strongest impact is through influence, just as with Pascal.
And languages being awkward is entirely a personal opinion, agreed. You might think in ObjC. I do not. There's nothing inherently wrong with either of us on those grounds.
I am not especially a fan of Python, myself, but I think most languages would LOVE to have a "bust phase" like Python does. If that's failure, failure's not so bad. :D
OP here. Yeah, you're not wrong. A lot of what IS driving AI code is that the writing code part isn't the intriguing aspect: it's designing, and the code generation is the grunt work that makes the design happen. And then you find out that most humans aren't that great at design: most programmers handwave their way through specifications, and thus the AIs do what they're told, and generate utter dreck, a lot like some of the "melody generators" do - they get handed very artificial constraints about what "good melodies" sound like, so they all sound very ordinary, because they STILL lack soul and replace inspiration with algorithm.
sigh The em-dash is something we've read a lot from GOOD PUBLISHED WRITING so we as human authors tend to emulate what we read as good writing. It's a publishing artifact that's migrated. It's not a sign of the apocalypse. Neither is AI, but hey.
Blame HN - anything people do is going to be wrong. The site encourages you to post URLs and everything about the URL is a comment - and gets treated as aggrandizement. Such is life: as long as people seek to accuse others, there's no way to win, no way to raise the water level such that all boats rise, and it's an enduring situation because too many people think it's better to elevate themselves no matter the cost to others, as long as THEY get elevated somehow.
Does that have something to do with OP's post, though? I mean, it's written like someone who's mostly formally familiar with English. Maybe your infamiliarity with formal English itself is factoring in, because the AIs are ALSO formal in diction?
I didn't get the same "AI wrote this" that you did, but I get a lot of people saying "AI wrote this" to stuff I definitely wrote by hand, all the way.
It is, I think. I published the article on BCN (the preface is me, the rest is a reader submission) and I find I agree with relatively little of the article, but I think it has observations worth looking at, even so.
In the sense that while there was a positive outcome ("We moved to Rust, which solved our issues with Zig no longer accepting AI-assisted content" - a projection on my part, but one I think makes sense) without an actual contribution that one would expect.
It's in Rust! That means Rust's memory safety applies! ... except as a direct port, it doesn't, it's got Zig's memory semantics in Rust-shaped code. As others have pointed out (including me, FWIW) that's something that can change... but it's not a simple thing to accomplish, and it may ALWAYS be a Zig-shaped skeleton in a bag of Rust.
If I recall correctly - and I might not - the process found places in the test suite that were wrong or lacked clarity, and the suite was modified slightly in a few places to actually fix things that needed fixing. I don't think it was a broad enough change to actually significantly affect the coverage to a real degree, but then again, that WOULD be a good thing to dive into the PR to check - and as I've pointed out, I'm not a Bun user myself, so my main response to that is a vaguely-interested shrug and a nod towards what seems to be the bigger issue: the use of AI to do things performatively.