Programming

I’ve recently read and thought about The Brutalist Programming Manifesto. I love the directness: Keep it simple. Solve problems. Nobody is smarter. Do everything yourself. Strive for robustness. Security is an illusion. Use input devices sensibly. Avoid eye-candy. Don’t depend on tools. Be humble. Don’t work for free unless you like it. Don’t listen to others. Some of it is unrealistic in a professional environment where you have to go along to get along sometimes.

This was an interesting take on how AI will impact programmers that resonated with me. It was written by Chelsea Troy who is a staff engineer at Mozilla and CS teacher at the University of Chicago. The post is definitely worth a read. In a nutshell, programming back in the old days used to be building code out of basic logical and data building blocks. Indeed, programmers are still taught these things in academic environments (and sometimes tested on them in job interviews).

An article in The New Yorker about feeling a little sad about the inevitable replacement of coding with AI really hit home for me. I’ve not used AI for coding yet professionally, but I’ve done a couple of experiments that indicate how useful it might be in replacing not only the boilerplate and drudgery but also some of the thinking that goes into it. I don’t think it will eliminate the role of people in creating software, but it will change it dramatically by potentially devaluing all of the deep techy things it was really fun to learn (e.

I really enjoyed this Strange Loop presentation by Jack Rusher. He covers a whole lot of ground in a humours and compelling talk about the dumb ideas that persist in programming. People in tech like to think they are on the cutting edge. In fact, we still follow many of the same theories that were invented many years ago. In many cases, we haven’t moved on from the basic structures that were used when people programmed with punch cards.