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   22 (22@octodon.social)'s status on Friday, 24-Mar-2023 12:37:48 JST 22

   in reply to

   Other predictions I’m happy to verbalize.

   Notebooks (Jupyter, etc.) aren’t the future—making this concrete I predict the percentage of respondents to Stack Overflow’s annual dev survey who say they use code notebooks will stay approximately fixed for the next ten years, i.e., plus or minus 2.5% the 2022 level of 11.61% (2021 level: 12.63%; both all respondents).

   In fact, nothing will unseat text editor-based coding in the next ten years except something like Darklang (https://darklang.com/ so, AST-level programming, i.e., the editor only allows you to ever input syntactically valid code). I assign a 10% chance of this happening (realistically 2-5% but I really want this to happen).

   I ran out of steam but I do notice something important in how I think about predictions like this—they’re in terms of what masses of developers care about, the people making apps for you and me and our mums and dads. Those devs are my people and I’m done pretending that I have zero clue what they should focus on learning.

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     22 (22@octodon.social)'s status on Friday, 24-Mar-2023 12:37:49 JST 22

     in reply to

     I’ve been trying to understand why I trust Yegge on his calls and what my own track record is.

     It was thanks to Yegge that I acknowledged my lurking realization that Haskell and niche programming languages won’t Go Big. And Go Big means something specific here—of course Haskell is great intrinsically and of course Scala advances the state of the art and all. Go Big here means it’s not something most makers like me (in the maker–hacker–poet simplex https://josephg.com/blog/3-tribes/) will care about.

     A little after that, I realized neither emacs nor vim are high-value to new or old engineers that didn’t grow up with them. I was good at vim but around the Sublime/Atom era I stopped recommending juniors go thru vimtutor, and of course myself converted to VS Code when that dropped.

     I ran Gentoo for years. But then I stopped recommending folks learn Linux and instead just Get Shit Done on their MacBooks. I wasn’t wrong and don’t think I’ll be wrong for the next five years.

     I knew React and SPA were gonna be huge. I’ve built great apps I’m really proud of with it, and I’m excited about the new post-React MPA era. I think the Express.js docs still talk about templating engines. What a farce—approximately nobody built a Node.js server using a templating language, it was JAMstack all the way.

     As soon as I saw that Merkle-tree-based platforms like Dat and Secure Scuttlebutt were append-only, I immediately dropped developing for them and just used Mastodon. Very little will beat a centralized Postgres database. I count this as a win.

     As soon as I saw Solidity’s API and irreversible transactions, I knew cryptocurrencies were a dead end. Happy owner of US Dollars (and Japanese Yen).

     Enumerating these big waves isn’t meant to convince me let alone anyone else that my opinions matter—read way too much Taleb and Kahneman and Galef for that. It’s more to convince myself that I should trust my instincts, and others with similar instincts, like Yegge (modulo the emacs thing ugh he loves his emacs). If only when it comes to making things with code. Being a code maker isn’t everything but it is everything to me, and I’m bullish on LLMs. I don’t think this is crypto or Google Glass or VR because I make shit.

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     22 (22@octodon.social)'s status on Friday, 24-Mar-2023 12:37:50 JST 22

     in reply to

     “A raw LLM is like a Harvard CS grad who knows a lot about coding and took a magic mushroom about 4 hours ago, so it’s mostly worn off, but not totally.”

     Ladies and gentlemen. The inimitable Steve Yegge ? https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/cheating-is-all-you-need

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     22 (22@octodon.social)'s status on Friday, 24-Mar-2023 12:37:51 JST 22

     Yes, I’ve missed Yegge’s full-on rant mode!

     “One of the craziest damned things I hear devs say about LLM-based coding help is that they can’t “trust” the code that it writes, because it “might have bugs in it”.

     Ah me, these crazy crazy devs.

     Can you trust code you yeeted over from Stack Overflow? NO!

     Can you trust code you copied from somewhere else in your code base? NO!

     Can you trust code you just now wrote carefully by hand, yourself? NOOOO!

     All you crazy MFs are completely overlooking the fact that software engineering exists as a discipline because you cannot EVER under any circumstances TRUST CODE. That’s why we have reviewers. And linters. And debuggers. And unit tests. And integration tests. And staging environments. And runbooks. And all of goddamned Operational Excellence. And security checkers, and compliance scanners, and on, and on and on!

     So the next one of you to complain that “you can’t trust LLM code” gets a little badge that says “Welcome to engineering motherfucker”. You’ve finally learned the secret of the trade: Don’t. Trust. Anything!“ https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/cheating-is-all-you-need

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     22 (22@octodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 25-Mar-2023 10:57:58 JST 22

     • Matthew Lyon

     @mattly I forgot how cool it was to use Paredit for Clojure in Vim! Today I struggle with selecting a line of text to wrap in parens and VS Code unhelpfully parens the semicolon ? I was devastated when Eve died http://witheve.com/ and have been waiting for Darklang to either get rich or die trying… and gritting my teeth at those semicolons