CIRCLE WITH A DOT

On the gripping hand, if you're a trained programmer using vibe-coding because of a perceived increase in your productivity, or pressure from management to increase your productivity, I would refer you to my first post in this thread…

@dasgrueneblatt I think you have misunderstood me: I think vibe coding is a horrendous problem, but it is a symptom of an industry failing. That people are trying to steer a tank with a speak'n'spell is because we have not made decent bikes.

You know what? HyperCard was a glorious moment in time that I dearly miss: an army of non-experts were bashing together and sharing weird and wonderful stacks that were part 'zine, part adventure game and part database. Instead of laughing at vibe-coders, maybe we should ask ourselves why the current state-of-the-art in beginner-friendly programming tools is a planet-boiling roulette wheel.

@dasgrueneblatt I have now spent 40 years programming commercially in dozens of different languages; I have taught programming to CS students, art students and little kids and my experience is that most programming is hard because we have made it so. I absolutely understand the frustration of people who know what their problem is, but don't feel equipped to solve it because the tools available to them are too big and confusing. Vibe coding is our own fault

@michael @jarkman Fuck yes! I want a thousand languages to bloom. It seems like once everyone used to write their own language and we fell out of the habit. The Dragon Book used to be required reading for CS…

@jarkman I can absolutely bend your ear at EMF, but conveniently I also recently gave a talk about it at Alpaca!

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@jarkman Heh! Most of my programming these days involves creating or using my own languages

@krig which is why we also make bikes and scooters – convenient tools that can be used by all ages and abilities

We seem to have largely stopped innovating on trying to lower barriers to programming in favour of creating endless new frameworks and libraries for a vanishingly small number of near-identical languages. It is the mid-2020s and people are wringing their hands over Rust as if it was some inexplicable new thing rather than a C-derivative that incorporates decades old type theory. You know what I consider to be genuinely ground-breaking programming tools? VisiCalc, HyperCard and Scratch.

@bit101 hold on, I've got another post incoming on exactly this…

I will say one thing for generative AI: since these tools function by remixing/translating existing information, that vibe programming is so popular demonstrates a colossal failure on the part of our industry in not making this stuff easier. If a giant ball of statistics can mostly knock up a working app in minutes, this shows not that gen-AI is insanely clever, but that most of the work in making an app has always been stupid. We have gatekeeped programming behind vast walls of nonsense.

My experience with generative-AI has been that, at its very best, it is subtly wrong in ways that only an expert in the relevant subject would recognise. So I don't worry about us creating super-intelligent AI, I worry about us allowing that expertise to atrophy through laziness and greed. I refuse to use LLMs not because I'm scared of how clever they are, but because I do not wish to become stupider.

@lpbkdotnet @jtruk Wikipedia believes that i18n was coined in the 70s and is DEC's fault. Since humans read word-at-a-time by shape, I consider them all to be instances of "I am too lazy to type and therefore you will have to work harder to read"

Do you know what's not accessible? Writing "a11y" in any article or documentation

I will accept it as a convenience in APIs since developers are lazy and can't spell, but fuck off with using it in text