CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@MLE_online "Nobody's drinking, so we've gotta make drinks more expensive" — how's *that* working out?

@jschuster @lindsey @cross @krismicinski @jfdm @csgordon @jeremysiek
Of course I don't think we'll never need to ever look at generated code again; that would be a foolish position. The interesting question is how much will people need to, and relative to what? If you have an amazing test suite or rich verified properties, for instance, how much do you need to review code? Most people aren't writing Dan Cross-level code. (The Bret Victor analogy is good.)

@cross @gwozniak @steve @krismicinski @jfdm @csgordon @lindsey @jeremysiek
We were already doing this. The entire low-code/no-code movement was all about making sure we stopped doing that in some domains, though we built 20+ systems that each tried to do that. (-:

@tonyg Unrelatedly, I was in the UK last month, and when I gave a talk in London (and later in Cambridge), was pleasantly surprised that Noel Walsh stopped in. I was reminiscing about how I'd attended a Racket meetup he organized in Islington back in 2003 or so, where I believe we met!

@tonyg @GeorgWeissenbacher @krismicinski @jfdm @csgordon @lindsey @jeremysiek
I very much think of what I'm doing with Claude Code as a kind of programming — indeed, the kind of programming I always wished I could do! But if it makes you happier to use a different term for it (not "vibecoding", that has too many specific connotations and is definitely not how *I'm* doing things), and it's *useful* to have that other term…that's fine by me. I guess my slogan is: "Philosophy…but not too much".

@krismicinski @cross @jfdm @csgordon @lindsey @jeremysiek
If people were taking advantage of that wonderful semantics business all along, @regehr would be out of business (indeed, would never be in business). Semantics has always been a bit of a fig leaf for the PL community.

@lindsey @cross @krismicinski @jfdm @csgordon @jeremysiek
It is absolutely an open research question as to what will be the new "source" and "intermediate" languages. I think we'll have a much better shot at the latter (richly-typed, semantic specifications as part of code, etc.); for the former, I think we'll build good ones but the trick will be getting people to use them.

@GeorgWeissenbacher @krismicinski @jfdm @csgordon @lindsey @jeremysiek
Yes to most of that. I think it's not that hard to assess if that is what people were always assessing that.

I actually disagree w/ your opening comment. Most intro CS educators will say (and have said), "I don't teach programming, I teach *problem solving*" (whatever the fuck that is). My response is, "great, this should be your liberation! Programming got easy, what are your «problem solving» ideas?"

@krismicinski @jfdm @csgordon @lindsey @jeremysiek
Yes, that would be a failure of curriculum design. And I'm saying we should be redesigning the curriculum to avoid that failure. (Not the only one, of course.)

It's 1960. People have invented compilers and the first real languages. Will you emphasize "but people must know how computers REALLY work", or will you say "shit just got real, let's elevate our learning objectives and figure out anew how to teach?"

@krismicinski @jfdm @csgordon @lindsey @jeremysiek
Literally what we're trying to learn in our course is *how* to do that.
https://cs.brown.edu/courses/csci1970kf/agentic-spr-2026/

@krismicinski @jfdm @csgordon @lindsey @jeremysiek
Notably, I'm talking about *novice* CS. For upper-level CS, it's pretty clear there are all kinds of interesting possibilities.

@krismicinski @jfdm @csgordon @lindsey @jeremysiek
I think I *am* interested in a kind of "how to use AI to do CS". I believe it can be done wisely and smartly.

@krismicinski @jfdm @csgordon @lindsey @jeremysiek
Good, you seem to understand the assignment! Now go out and design and run a course that puts that into practice! Listening to me talk about it is 50 fewer minutes you'll have, and which you can't get back, to design your course. (-:

@jfdm @csgordon @lindsey @jeremysiek @krismicinski
Yes, it requires a fair bit of work to re-jig things.

I can't speak for UK academia. But I view it as my job to figure out how to upgrade courses for my students.

I don't know what power you think "full chairs" have in the US. You may be mistaking us for German Lehrstuhl's. We aren't! US "assistant professors" are not "assistants" to any "professors", for instance. I may wish I had some; I don't. <-;

@jfdm @csgordon @lindsey @jeremysiek @krismicinski
"we are doomed" is an incredibly disappointing take. You should have come to my "GenAI and CS Ed" talk (-:.

If our only value-add was "my course was gated behind a needlessly difficult thing", that doesn't say much for the value of our courses.