Lars Wirzenius4d ago

I first learned how to program in 1984 at 14. The tech press said I'd be obsolete by 25, due to age.

About 1990 tech press said the Japanese were building fifth generation computers to make me obsolete.

In 2000, the dot com bubble bursting was said to make me obsolete.

There's been neural networks, no-code, and more, since then, to make me obsolete.

Now it's LLMs.

Excuse me while I sit here and don't panic.

#rant

EDIT: This blew up. Muting the thread for some peace and quiet.

Show threadThe Penguin of Evil4d ago

@liw There were things that pulled stuff away from programmers though. Much of it at the time was hidden by the growth in demand.
Excel, BASIC, some expert systems, Hypercard, DBase and friends all enabled an army of not-really-programmer people to get real work done without having to become programming experts of any kind.

None of them hallucinated or ate entire data centres for lunch. Their output was predictable if slow and they kept working over upgrades in general.

Show threadThe Penguin of Evil4d ago
@liw The real sad thing is the tools that were heading towards making some programming obsolete or at least much easier - stuff that worked off formal proofs and graph theory all got thrown under the bus when shiny "AI" stuff came along.
Show threadDavid Phd

@etchedpixels @liw

The problem with formal proof systems is messy requirements and change control. Which is why

- Sociologists can be Surprisingly
Useful in Interactive Systems
Design (October 1997)

https://archive.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/STSE-Handbook/Papers/SociologistscanbeSurprisinglyUsefulinInteractiveSystemsDesign-Sommerville.pdf

AI doesn't help with the Requirements Engineering problem.

Mar 19 at 9:19amWeb