Jonathan HoggMy experience with generative-AI has been that, at its very best, it is subtly wrong in ways that only an expert in the relevant subject would recognise. So I don't worry about us creating super-intelligent AI, I worry about us allowing that expertise to atrophy through laziness and greed. I refuse to use LLMs not because I'm scared of how clever they are, but because I do not wish to become stupider.
I will say one thing for generative AI: since these tools function by remixing/translating existing information, that vibe programming is so popular demonstrates a colossal failure on the part of our industry in not making this stuff easier. If a giant ball of statistics can mostly knock up a working app in minutes, this shows not that gen-AI is insanely clever, but that most of the work in making an app has always been stupid. We have gatekeeped programming behind vast walls of nonsense.
We seem to have largely stopped innovating on trying to lower barriers to programming in favour of creating endless new frameworks and libraries for a vanishingly small number of near-identical languages. It is the mid-2020s and people are wringing their hands over Rust as if it was some inexplicable new thing rather than a C-derivative that incorporates decades old type theory. You know what I consider to be genuinely ground-breaking programming tools? VisiCalc, HyperCard and Scratch.
jarkman@jonathanhogg That's the kind of talk you usually hear just before someone invents themselves a new language. Just saying.
@jarkman Heh! Most of my programming these days involves creating or using my own languages š
@jonathanhogg :-) I would like to hear more about that sometime.
@jarkman I can absolutely bend your ear at EMF, but conveniently I also recently gave a talk about it at Alpaca! š
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9khHD9sB7M&list=PLxqmZjMvoVzw773-Fo9ajkujFfOThuFOP&index=9
Flitter: A declarative language for structured visuals by Jonathan Hogg
Graham K@jarkman @jonathanhogg Would love to have my ear bent about Flitter at EMF š. Are you planning to do your talk there? (I guess thereās that YouTube you posted, but I kind of like live performance š)
@jonathanhogg @jarkman Ack. Having now watched, I think your Alpaca talk is a pretty good intro. I see some resonance in your approach with OpenSCAD (different goals, of course).
@jarkman @jonathanhogg Several years ago, I played around with using Haskell as a substrate for a DSL. Used a combinator parser (Parsec) to spit out a directly executable ācompiledā function. Iāve occasionally thought it would be fun to do something similar for CSG.