So in a way it's proving its own point. Why painfully write out by hand in English when the LLM will do a better job by porting your English prompt to AIglish and get +235 points and #3 on HN?
>It's strange to me that this blog post was written in English. If AI is available, why aren't we all communicating in Lojban?
your comment seems to have not gotten his joke which was a recursion on English of the point of the article vis a vis Python
Do you want these to be shorter for quick replies on X/Twitter, or longer for more detailed forum discussions?
I was not able to detect it's written by LLMs from the opening paragraphs. Can you please share some insights as to what gives it away. I didn't find any blatant stuff like em dashes or "it's not just x it's y".
The article uses too much contrast even if not as obvious as "it's not x, it is y". Also some too punchy or over confident stuff like "that era is over blah blah".
Amusingly, you can feed it to an AI to extract the patterns that gives away that it is AI written.
Microsoft, for all their warts, at least had the compassion to call their AI product "Copilot", suggesting we have some residual agency in whatever it is that it produces.
Reading code carefully is harder than writing code unless the code is written consistently and clearly in a way that is idiomatic to the reader. And there's way more code to review now, but companies aren't scaling up the number of skilled engineers on staff. So in practice, never reading all of the diffs is the MO that will be built into code we depend on.
Quite a few capable engineers really are that short-sighted!
The bigger question for the AI-techbro questioning "If AI writes your code, why use Python?" is "If AI writes your code, what use do we have for you?"
After all, there's dozens of people in the same business that have better domain knowledge but are unable to program - as a programmer the only value you added over random analysts and clerks was that you could automate shit.
Now you can't, so good luck competing with people who were already making half your salary when your largest value-prop is now gone.
Possibly also some user-facing tools with a limited task and runtime environment.
Incidentally, these are all use cases where performance isn’t critical, typically, so you might as well write them in Python or Typescript or whatever makes most sense for the task.
Real production code? Yeah, you still need to be able to read it and understand it.
What if it's from an external vendor? A 3rd party SaaS?
At which point do you stop caring about reading every line of code you run?
I appreciate not everyone feels this way, but that's why I personally would be anathema not to read its code.
I don't care if the duck is wet spaghetti inside, it does what I need it to do within the parameters I can measure.
If it fails to quack or walk later on, I have production alerts for that and I'll deal with it then.
I understand you're being facetious, but I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about programming languages in comparison.
Sure, if you are going to have an AI do all your coding and maintenance you can use whatever language it’s best at. But if you want to participate in the writing, debugging, and maintenance, it has to be in a language that a human can read. I’m not saying that Rust or Go is unreadable, but I know I am better at Python personally and am going to keep using it until the speed penalty matters to my project, and then maybe I’ll let an AI rewrite the whole thing in a faster language.
So unless you’re into burning tokens having AI generate untested libraries, I’d stick to using the most idiomatic tool for the problem you are tackling.
And honestly it's not burning that many tokens if you've got an existing example lib to point to.
(Kind of the inverse of perl)
I think the idea is that languages like Python and JavaScript make it easier for humans to write the initial implementation, whereas the "hard" languages from the perspective of creating the minimum viable product are the ones that make it easier for humans to maintain the code, and this has historically been a major trade off.
Whereas if you have the AI write the initial implementation...
I hate Python (app distribution is painful), but will still reach for it before I reach for Go. Rust doesn't even enter the equation.
I would not have even needed to reach for Go in about half my programs if Python had mandatory typing and single-file no-dep distribution.
> and then maybe I’ll let an AI rewrite the whole thing in a faster language.
Even then, my reasons for discarding Python when I do discard it is almost never "performance", it's because the problem space requires mandatory typing for complex data types, or concurrency, or easy distribution.
Of course, this requires me to figure out quite early ion a project that those things would be needed.
But if I’m participating then I’m going to use Python because it’s easier to read.
If there’s anything that I’m arguing against is the author’s claim that the ecosystem of libraries (regardless of whether they are a wrapper) and readability don’t matter anymore. I’d say that in a lot of smaller teams it still matters. We’re not all using AI to ship slop. A lot of us are using AI to work on our ideas for our hobbies or for research. And it’s not fulfilling unless I get to be involved in the process.
And this isn't even a defense of the premise. I'm not using AI to generate assembly code, because I don't know assembly.
I took the challenge and asked Perplexity. I have no idea how much of it is correct, if any, but I think the result[0] is pretty interesting anyway, especially compared to Esperanto [1].
[0] https://www.perplexity.ai/search/8315bbb6-fa32-40f3-8b2b-c6c...
[1] https://www.perplexity.ai/search/9c3839ba-1d68-4be9-afd1-4ef...
No, it's intended to generate traction for the author who lists his primary occupation as "building AI coding tools".
His goal is not the same as your goal.
Anecdotally, I think language effects the way you think more than most people realise, which is why I think a logical language is a great idea: it might "trick" people into thinking more logically!
Now to get someone to actually speak it with!
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2011/entries/relativi...
I was only speaking from personal experience, I moved from Sweden to Brazil in my early twenties and after a while I began thinking and dreaming in Portuguese. I noticed then that my thought process changed(actually, I noticed it upon moving back to Sweden, as my thoughts and dreams shifted back to my mother's tongue. The shift the way back was much faster since I already spoke Swedish whereas in Brazil I had to learn the language before beginning thinking in it)
Anyway, I noticed then that I would interpret the world differently depending on which language I used for my internal monologue. Like way different. It was a curious experience!
I don't really know Esperanto but did they make a language from scratch with gender inconsistencies like in the already existing ones? Unless the a and o at the end of both words don't express gender like in Latin derived languages.
The recipient of the blog posts (all of us) can read English. None can read whatever this Logjam is.
If AI writes code why not write it straight into assembler or binary? No need to compile an intermediate language if the end user (the machine) is running on binary not on Python, nor on Rust, nor on BASIC or Swift or any intermediary human-optimised language
I get what you are trying to say but its a pretty bad analogy.
Also all programming languages do use english mainly in syntax but you are probably from a english-speaking country so you don't notice the irony.
And most people using AI will not need to edit their code at all if you go at all right? They will just keep refactoring with AI, why does the toughness of learning a language or whatever matter in this situation?