I'm not fan of generative AI but this is so, so accurate.

[wwahammy@social.treehouse.systems]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@glyph/116072915065555041

I'm not fan of generative AI but this is so, so accurate.

[tempest@social.treehouse.systems]

@wwahammy i remember learning to program on the TI-84 calculators and yeah it was a huge help that every language keyword was just in the same menu as part of the program editor

i didn't know what they all did, but at least knowing what options there were meant then i could look it up

[pointlessone@status.pointless.one]

@wwahammy @glyph idunno… Is it suspicious that in the list of examples there’s no writing?

Like, I can open Word and all the tools on display and I can mash keyboard to make it show some letter but can I write a story? One would think that LLMs would open up the whole realm of storytelling to noobs but we somehow still don’t like AI-generated books.

Anyway, discoverability in programming is very close to that in prose. A word processor could put buttons for basic grammatical constructions like a typical visual programming environment but is it that useful? And that’s as many APIs as there are words if not more so it’s impossible to put those in button on toolbars.

We actually have a fairly good discoverability UI in programming: contextual complete. It can show you what syntactically acceptable at the cursor, what APIs available and match what’s typed so far and even documentation for the selected option. It’s much more than any word processor gives.