It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful. So employees just play along with the fiction to keep their jobs, writes our tech columnist
Not at all. It gives the practitioner the option of skipping the learning.
Starting in the 1990s I started skipping the learning of assembly language, compilers got good enough that I just don’t need to know how the latest SIMD/MIMD/ whatever instructions work, I just express what I want in C and gcc or whatever handles the optimization for me.
Comparing it to an (almost) entirely complete abstraction where you (almost) never have any benefit to looking under the covers like c over assembler is completely dishonest.
entirely complete abstraction where you (almost) never have any benefit to looking under the covers like c over assembler is completely dishonest.
Is it, though? In the early 1990s I could still optimize compiler output by hand, here and there. In the 1980s it was common practice and necessary in many circumstances to make complex things happen on the constrained hardware. In the 1970s there were a lot of programmers who never touched Fortran, just practiced assembly all the time because Fortran was too inefficient for their needs.
I’ll say that LLMs, this year, are something like compilers were in the 1960s - a revolutionary improvement in accessibility of coding, being able to express what you want in “natural language” - like COBOL did starting in 1959.
LLMs have plenty of pitfalls that COBOL doesn’t today, but I’ll note that Borland Turbo C++ compiler in 1991 was too damn buggy to do anything much more complex than “Hello, World.” with.
Yes. Acting like an LLM over a programming language is anything close to a higher level over lower level programming language makes you completely full of shit.
Not at all. It gives the practitioner the option of skipping the learning.
Starting in the 1990s I started skipping the learning of assembly language, compilers got good enough that I just don’t need to know how the latest SIMD/MIMD/ whatever instructions work, I just express what I want in C and gcc or whatever handles the optimization for me.
Comparing it to an (almost) entirely complete abstraction where you (almost) never have any benefit to looking under the covers like c over assembler is completely dishonest.
Is it, though? In the early 1990s I could still optimize compiler output by hand, here and there. In the 1980s it was common practice and necessary in many circumstances to make complex things happen on the constrained hardware. In the 1970s there were a lot of programmers who never touched Fortran, just practiced assembly all the time because Fortran was too inefficient for their needs.
I’ll say that LLMs, this year, are something like compilers were in the 1960s - a revolutionary improvement in accessibility of coding, being able to express what you want in “natural language” - like COBOL did starting in 1959.
LLMs have plenty of pitfalls that COBOL doesn’t today, but I’ll note that Borland Turbo C++ compiler in 1991 was too damn buggy to do anything much more complex than “Hello, World.” with.
Yes. Acting like an LLM over a programming language is anything close to a higher level over lower level programming language makes you completely full of shit.