CIRCLE WITH A DOT

The most recognizable thing about AI generated code seems to be its commenting style: there's a dearth of fully-formed sentences and an abundance of "the next line of code is doing X".

Now, my take on LLMs generating code is that they generate the mean of all code they encountered. Just as with testing, this commenting style is indicative of just how bad human-generated code seems to be, on average.

I won't stand for this reduction of quality, but I'm sure that half the coders out there will see an improvement by using AI

@m3tti glad you like it so far!

@krono yup.

To be fair, I think a lot of Elixir teams work on what I call "one-shot webapps". The sort of tests that Claude essentially told me are commonplace are fine for that. But in the context of an ISV or SaaS company... it'll kill your productivity.

@ramin_hal9001 @kentpitman @screwlisp @wrog not just zero downtime, the more important aspect is how it does concurrency, how it manages to scale that, and how well it fits the modern requirements of "webapps" (like a glove).

It changed my thinking about objects, just like Smalltalk did before. I'm fully on board with Joe Armstrong's quip that Erlang is "the most OO language" (or something to that extent); having objects with effectively their own address space, their own processor scheduling, etc, completely changes how you think about building scalable concurrent systems (and _then_ you get clustering for free, and sometimes hot reloading is a production thing, although 99% of the time it is good to have it in the REPL)

@wrog @kentpitman @screwlisp @ramin_hal9001 it's a good chunk of the reason why Erlang shines here. Per-process GC can be kept simple (a process is more like an object than a thread, so you have lots of them) and no equivalent of setq - all data is immutable.

(there is a shared heap, but that also is just immutable data).

We started using Claude code at work. In a reasonable way, I must say: let's give it a spin, see what it can do for us, treat it as a tool in the toolbox, not a developer-displacing silver bullet, etc.

Anyway, I was working on a ticket, took time to install the CLI, and then asked it to generate a test for some new code I wrote (usually I TDD, sometimes I code my way first to a solution, it depends. No silver bullets, just tools in the toolbox).

What happened next made me giggle, because the test was hilariously bad and full of all sorts of antipatterns.

What happened _next_ made me cry. I realized that Anthropic just scraped all the Elixir code it could get its hands on so the style of test its product generates reflects the general "state of the art" in the Elixir community.

Realizing that made me very sad. I guess it's time to write a blog post on proper test approaches in Elixir (too bad I cannot use Claude's code as a showcase as it is work code, it'd be a great exposition piece).

(cont)

@kentpitman @screwlisp @ramin_hal9001 it'd be interesting to make a family tree of programming language implementations by where they got their GC design from. Java started out real bad (well, fine for the sort of embedded systems it was initially targeted at, not so fine for the stuff I tried to do with the 1.0 version) but picked up good (generational) GC from Self and Strongtalk, in other words more directly from Smalltalk than Lisp. But, well, a lot of history shared between Lisp and Smalltalk makes them more joined at the hip than most people realize :-).

@jawarajabbi I was lucky in the sense that my "tech career" started with a u-turn through business school, so I'm less inclined to think of sales and marketing as "dirty" activities. Still, I would have preferred the book not to be self-published because it's hardly the sort of stuff I like to volunteer for :-). Regardless, a plan is in place and will be executed.

@NortherlyGoose PM me and I'll add them to the errata page.

@NortherlyGoose known issue, I asked Kobo to push out a corrected version.

@NortherlyGoose So... shockingly, Kobo does not allow updates to ebooks. It can, on request, push a replacement ebook but that also wipes bookmarks and notes for everybody. That's pretty bad, so I think I'll have to pull Kobo as a channel and see how I can reach people to receive updates from me directly. More to follow.

@NortherlyGoose yeah, one drawback of indirect sales channels is that all I can do is upload a new revision and then wait for the distributor confirmation "it is done!". I'll check today on a "not me" account to see whether things have propagated, if not, I'll have to ping Kobo support.

@rjray Try it again, support just pinged me that the broken download issue should have been fixed. If not, private message me with your order number and we'll work something out.

Glad you like the book!

@NortherlyGoose an update is live on Kobo. I tested both on my Sage (I have a Sage, not a Libra) and on screen, the formulas seem to render fine (I've opted not to risk using MathML because I am not sure how wide support for that is, so as far as I can see they are SVGs, not much I can do w.r.t. rendering quality there).

New ebook revision has a revision identifier ("first revision") on the copyright page.

@NortherlyGoose strange. What version are you using? I've tested on my laptop and on my Libra and things looked fine there.

Well, today is the day. I'm finally "sorta happy enough to pull the trigger" on publishing the book I've been working on for a very long time. It's a technical history book: by a techie, for techies (although I think that between all the code samples, there is plenty of meat for "tech-adjacent" and "tech-interested" people). It tells the story of the Lisp programming language, invented by a genius called John McCarthy in 1958 and today still going strong (to the extent that many people see it as the most powerful programming language in existence).

And this is a time for shameless self promotion, even if you don't plan on buying the book, please repost :-). Self-publishing is self-marketing, so there we go.

If you do buy and read it, please let me know how you liked it!

The book landing page, https://berksoft.ca/gol, has links to all outlets where you can buy the book,