Dear journalists writing about AI being the end of programming as a profession:

Programming has a long history of embracing tools that make things more productive. The manual for the STANTEC ZEBRA explains that a limitation of 150 instructions is not a practical problem because no one could possibly write a working program that complex. Today, we routinely write programs several three orders of magnitude more complex than that in an afternoon. Higher-level languages have increased programmer productivity by literal orders of magnitude. Things like integrated debugging environments, reliable autocompletion, higher-level type systems, and so on have all been embraced because they let you solve the problems faster.

Note that they don’t all let you write more code quickly. Most of the improvements in productivity have had the opposite impact. They don’t let you write code faster, they let you write less code to do the same things. This started with libraries of reusable code and simple abstractions like functions and has grown over time. I can write a simple dynamic web page in a couple of lines of PHP, where doing the same thing in the assembly languages that the ZEBRA folks were talking about would require me to write thousands of lines. The PHP version would be more portable and also vastly easier to adapt to changing requirements.

At the same time, there are far more problems that need programs to solve them than there are people who can write programs. If programmer productivity doubled tomorrow, there would not be enough programmers. If people who can’t program were all suddenly able to program at the level of a first-year undergraduate tomorrow, there would still not be enough programmers. And that’s why our industry puts so much effort into end-user programming languages. That’s why the most successful programming language, with over a billion users, is Microsoft Excel.

With all that in mind, don’t you think that the fact that most programmers need mandates from management to use bullshit generators to ‘help’ programming might be an indication that the hype isn’t all it claims to be?

Excellent news yesterday, the #CHERIoT RTOS paper was accepted at SOSP!

Huge thanks to @hle, who led on rewriting the rejected submission and made numerous improvements to the implementation.

We now have CHERIoT papers in top architecture and OS venues, I guess security and networking are the next places to aim for!

#CHERI