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We Should Be Able to Change Our Languages

27 points surprisetalk 1 day ago 10 comments

tombert 1 hour ago | parent

At the risk of being a bit of a douchebag, it seems like nearly every tech opinion piece I read now boils down to "things used to be hard but they aren't anymore because LLMs can understand things faster than we can, so can ignore/change fundamentals!"

I didn't really find the argument convincing the first time and I don't really find it convincing now.

That said, with regards to macros, I actually do agree that the fear against them is broadly overblown. I have seen scary terrible horrifying macro soup in Clojure, but that has generally been outlier cases. Something like core.async abuses the hell out of macros, and despite that I think it very often increases readability and understanding of the language.

smitty1e 1 hour ago | parent

As long as GPS stays bullet proof, Navies are in good shape.

It's going to be a hard come-to-Beevis moment if the magic signal goes away and people have to remember celestial navigation.

Not sure you can even find a sextant on most vessels.

So too these AI services.

QuesnayJr 1 hour ago | parent

The Navy was phasing out celestial navigation, but after some public outrage from retired naval officers they brought it back.

manyatoms 1 hour ago | parent

Does this mean using the star-tracking devices like what satellites have, or like a human paper/pen thing?

obviouslynotme 47 minutes ago | parent

It should mean both. They need to learn how to do it by hand and then learn how to lean on a navigation system. If only GPS fails, then the celestial navigation program fallback runs without a hitch. If shit hits the fan, then they can break out the manual and remember how to do it by hand.

fragmede 47 minutes ago | parent

GPS service is obviously going to go down whenever World War III goes hot, so the Navy is definitely training sailors on the alternatives.

nvme0n1p1 56 minutes ago | parent

And even if LLMs do our thinking for us, it's still not a reason to fork the programming language you're using, unless you expect me to believe an LLM can understand `foo |> bar` but it can't understand `bar(foo(x))`. If you're not looking at the code, it doesn't matter how pretty the code is anymore.

tinlid 1 hour ago | parent

My last project needed Rust for one module, but the rest was Go. Felt silly rewriting core logic just to stay unified.

pie_flavor 1 hour ago | parent

Rust has been a practical experiment in macros for ten years now. I think it is safe to say the results are in: macros are great, and you just needed to have a better style of macros. Making and using something like `tokio::select!` in C-style macros is miserable, but `tokio::select!` is easy to use and understand in Rust.

brinepot 39 minutes ago | parent

Moving from Java to Kotlin was a breath of fresh air; sometimes a language change genuinely unlocks productivity.