I use vanilla emacs and compile from source straight from master at whatever commit it happens to be in when I decide to do it.
Only once was there a noticeable breakage when a command like `git log` in the terminal would spit out all its output instead of displaying one screenful at a time. I'd expect someone following stable releases wouldn't experience any breakages.
> Matz has said as much. He’s described Ruby’s design as starting from a simple Lisp, stripping out macros and s-expressions, then adding an object system, blocks, and Smalltalk-style methods. The features most Rubyists fall in love with aren’t the object-oriented ones. They’re the functional ones, dressed in friendlier clothes.
> For better or worse, parenthesis aren't that bad with the proper IDE tooling.
Hell, even without [0], you can at least count the parenthesis by hand in a pinch. I remember seeing lots of crazy-awesome stuff done in AutoLisp by 'non-programmers', versus 'structure as spacing' in Python which really sucks if the Editor was designed to use the system default (probably non-monospaced, cause other products in the industry had dialogs that broke if you switched to a monospaced) font. [1]
[0] - but real talk parenthesis matching in an editor is a lifesaver
[1] - oooooold version of a very popular GIS product.
Hypothetically if LLMs were possible in the early 90s, what would the software ecosystem look like today?
Would it be 80s technology everywhere but widely deployed? Or would things have advanced further - better compilers, more ergonomic languages, better platforms etc? I don't know. But I suspect we'd still have needed people studying computer science to advance the state of the art.
Now looking forward 30-40 years from now, will everything still run on 2020s technologies?
If anything it seems wide deployment of LLMs would go against this. When nobody writes code by hand anymore, who will care about the ergonomics of programming languages? And even if a few do care, how would you get adoption? I expect everyone will just use whatever is already used most.
I agree, it seems like the current most popular languages and frameworks will become ossified, because they have the highest amount of training data. It's hard to see a future where Python and JavaScript aren't the most popular languages to use (assuming LLM-assisted development is the norm moving forward).
LLMs can be pretty conmpetent at languages that have zero training data, at least to the extent that those languages use features/ideas that are familiar. I wrote a toy language/compiler and AI can write code for it competently.
It seems that now more than ever, testing is important. But LLMs love to cheat the tests and make them superficially pass. If you're never reading the code, how do you know changes are reasonable?
I do review, if only whatever I do was the norm for everyone :)
Do you see lots of posts about new compilers and languages and language features on HN in the last year? Maybe I just missed them. I'd love to read more posts like that and fewer about agent frameworks.
Don't tell me were going to rediscover progressive enhancement all over again after more than a decade. Back when we used to actually care about the end user whether you were programming frontend or backend.
Too much VC money and big tech influence in the JS ecosystem made the web worse in some ways.
I keep hearing the term "dead internet theory" getting thrown around, and at first thought it was referring to web pages that don't work, not high rates of bot-generated content.
I've had far more trouble with web pages that only work on a computer that's at least 80% similar to the developers computer, and the RAM sacrifice has been accepted, than from bots diluting real user-generated content, assuming I can even get to the page, if the CDN doesn't think I'm a bot myself, because I'm not logged into a Google or Apple account and their captcha is so bad only a bot could get through it.
The best outcome of the AI hype for was to be the investment into next generation nuclear power plants, ushering the world into a post energy scarcity era.
Maybe we'll get there, maybe not. These days I only hear of datacenter investments.
I highly respect the Ken Thompson and the rest of the old UNIX hands, but wouldn't they admit that the real world is messy and the best solutions in isolation don't always win?
Their creation C and UNIX won over the more advanced LISP and Smalltalk systems because they were simpler to implement. Even their own more advanced Plan 9 based OSs could not displace the more widespread unix-like systems.
It seems distribution and 'good enough' to rely on always wins. IMO, dynamic languages like Perl, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, PHP and the heavily marketed Java provided good enough high level facilities that have prevented people from reaching for Lisp and Smalltalk.
Looking at it through this lens, perhaps C++ was the vehicle for strapping some high level facilities on a widely adopted low level performant language that made it just good enough of a technology for wide adoption.
You think that LISP and Smalltalk aren't widely used is because they weren't easy to implement in the late 1980's? There have been many languages that have risen to prominence in the 40 years since, yet LISP and Smalltalk remain niche languages.
My opinion is that Lisp and Smalltalk are too pure and abstract. C is heavily tied to the real world of computing and can be easier to grasp for beginner. But try to explain variable bindings (instead of assignment) or message passing (instead of function calls) to a beginner in programming. It’s not that they’re hard to explain or understand, they’re just hard to be completely grasped without a foundation in computer science. They’re too alien.
Rust, Python, Java, Ruby, Scala, Swift to start with. These are languages with very wide adoption. Objective-C is very Smalltalk-like, but it is being phased out for Swift.
> Outsourcing the work deprives you of who you become by writing it.
Just because AI can do something that resembles work should not mean outsourcing work to it. Mathematicians should not outsource their work to AI just like programmers should not outsource programming to AI.
Humans working with AIs in a tight loop means intellectual work becomes more high-level and creative, but a human should always own the work, validate it and stake their reputation to it. Simply ban any humans who produce low quality work using AI.
I don't think that is possible. Humans have always taken the path of least resistance, especially when it comes to work/school.
The idea that we just "trust everyone to carefully check and learn from AI output" as our barrier to human skillsets eroding is never going to work.
There is an Anthropic engineering post on HM front page that addresses this exact issue:
"... supervise the agent’s behavior via a human-in-the-loop. Claude Code previously protected against agents taking unintended actions by asking users for permission at each turn. Theoretically that works, but we’ve found the approach to be fallible. Our telemetry showed users approved roughly 93% of permission prompts. The more approvals a user sees, the less attention they pay to each, becoming over time much less diligent in their supervision. "
Yeah I'm seeing this with the attitude towards AI. Especially as the economic benefits increase, we will justify increasingly reckless approaches. (Probably until some major catastrophe. That seems to be how these things go.)
While it is human nature to minimize energy expended on doing things, progress has always come from the minority who prioritize disciplined thinking and action.
While minimizing energy spent worked well in historic periods where survival was hard, in this era of abundance and a complex, interconnected and fragile civilization, the same instinct becomes harmful.
> Mathematicians should not outsource their work to AI just like programmers should not outsource programming to AI.
There is a huge difference between the two. Mathematicians work on discovering fundamental truths of the universe that go into the corpus of human knowledge forever. Programmers create utilities.
I know a PHD in math that claims math is invented by ourselves and not any universal true. So well, depends who you ask.
Also some of these programming utilities may outlive some math proof. Time will tell
Of course they are universal truths. We may have made up the rules/abstractions/symbols to represent the underlying but a proof will hold in any part of the universe. Infact, math will hold in any universe. You could change every fundamental physical property of the universe and those proofs will still hold.
Those are wild claims that you can't possibly prove. They are typically assumed to be the case to the extent that we even think about them but in the end are largely unanswerable philosophical questions.
It’s not a claim, it’s a pretty self apparent fact. To wrap your head around this, as the simplest example 2+2=4 doesn’t change anywhere or under any different physical law. It’s as universal as you can get. There’s nothing philosophical about this.
It is a claim, and you can't test it. If physical laws varied between galaxies you wouldn't know unless we were able to measure it. So the current bound on physical phenomena is whatever the resolution of our observational data is, coupled with our models that match it.
How are you going to get observational data for a different universe? Does such a thing even exist? What is its nature? You're operating well outside the bounds of human knowledge.
What you are actually saying there is that you can't imagine 2+2 being anything other than 4. That's perfectly reasonable but it's not the same thing.
There is no circumstance where 2+2 does not equal 4. It is a literal fact.
At the most fundamental level, you can only have a discreet or a non-discreet universe. If it’s discreet, there are countable things and 2+2 = 4 is true. In a non-discreet universe there are no countable things, but the universe itself is countable. If the universe were non-discreet and infinite, you could still count the infinities so it’s still true.
You are making a number of assumptions there seemingly without realizing it even after I explicitly called it out. I'm not sure what to say other than to suggest that there's an entire field, analytic philosophy, concerned with such matters.
You literally can't prove that you aren't a brain in a vat so I have no idea how you expect to make sweeping claims about the fundamental nature of reality. It is certainly convenient and practical to take certain basic assumptions as fact in order to go about higher level tasks but that does not make them so.
Sure, technically you are correct, i cant prove that im not a schizophrenic hallucinating everything including 2+2=4 and including this discussion. But starting from a reasonable point of beliefs that we accept it is fair to say 2+2=4 will just hold universally when counting discrete things.
Even if you were a brain in a vat this would be true. Even if the simulation disallowed the number four or groups of four it would still be true. How are you not getting this? What does philosophy have to do with anything. Pretty much everything in this universe is debatable and can be questioned, except this. Anyways I’m dropping out of this. You don’t come back with anything except a sense of wonder and a wide eyed gaze.
Noticeably you still have yet to defend any of these wild claims you're making. You've now resorted to personal attacks rather than engage with what I wrote.
If you are so certain of your claim then why are you seemingly incapable of defending it using logic and reason?
> What does philosophy have to do with anything.
If you took the time to look up the field of analytic philosophy to see what it's about, particularly with regards to metaphysics, that would presumably answer your question. There are literally treatise on the underlying nature of numbers and mathematical concepts (among other things) and you will find that there are multiple competing views on the matter.
When someone says "hey it seems like you're unaware of thing" and you think "WTF even is that" it is at that point generally a good idea to think to yourself "hey maybe there's something important that I don't know here" and then at least perform a topical check of the thing.
Only once was there a noticeable breakage when a command like `git log` in the terminal would spit out all its output instead of displaying one screenful at a time. I'd expect someone following stable releases wouldn't experience any breakages.
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