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sebastianconcpt | on: Squeak 6.1
And some months ago I was flirting with the idea of "Smalltalk and Erlang had a baby" and have Smalltalk syntax to an actor environment ran by a Erlang VM style. Plus some insanely cool ideas about a causal debugger for distributed bugs.

The problem is that as beautiful as programing in that sound, we're not even coding anymore, AIs will take the fun of it.

Although, thinking long term and for understendabilitymaxxin and reliabilitymaxxin it might still be worth having something like that.

Since Smalltalk can be so close to english and Erlang VM so reliable, humans and LLMs should thrive on it.

jonjacky | parent | next
I was flirting with the idea ... Plus some insanely cool ideas ... The problem is that as beautiful as programing in that sound, we're not even coding anymore, AIs will take the fun of it.

We've come to this. The mere existence of AI is discouraging people from pursuing creative ideas. This is a catastrophe! It's not just taking the fun out of life, it's destroying alternative futures we might have built.

There is this advice for dealing with tyrants and would-be tyrants: "Do not obey in advance." In your case that means pursuing and implementing your exciting ideas.

... it might still be worth having something like that.

Yes! Good luck with it!

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mncharity | parent | next
> we're not even coding anymore, AIs will take the fun of it.

Or... Writing a compiler from a large language test suite is already an LLM sweet spot. Writing code which is atypically pretty and readable isn't... but there's at least a possibility of that changing someday.

Imagine a future Lisp-ish culture of "write code to communicate with humans - prioritize readability - machine execution is incidental" and "don't merely solve a problem - write a language for the problem space (and keep it cleanly updated)"... but moving at LLM-catalyzed speed. So much fun.

gliall_err | parent
Metalworking, lathes, precision tooling, are all way more valuable skills and tools today than they ever were before the industrial revolution.

I suspect that over time a good grasp of fundamentals and great tooling will only get more valuable in software as well as automation expands, in whichever form.

Automation expands the demand for skills. It can never diminish it. Required variety indicates that complexity doesn't go away with automation, and at some level someone will have to understand and make decisions about complex issues. You can't automate all the way down. Or, put another way, everything is already automated all the way down. The expansion of automation as we perceive it is merely the growth of complexity over new dimensions.

Or put a third way: automation means two different things: constraint and liberty. The confusion arising from not discerning which one is in force makes it seems like one can grow unbounded. Liberty requires constraint and vice versa.