elmar

@seachaint@masto.hackers.town @rootwyrm@weird.autos @jackwilliambell@rustedneuron.com @cstross@wandering.shop Perl was never a write-only language but lots of write-only developers were using Perl in its day. Now lots of the new breed of write-only developers use JavaScript and it shows. Neither Perl nor JavaScript are "beautiful" languages out of the gate, but both are powerful enough that with discipline they allow for well-structured, maintainable code. One core tenant of the "less is more" argument is that you should understand all of the code you write and hence it must be small enough that this is possible. AI defeats that goal unless you use AI only to teach you about programming. In my experience this is ultimately more work than learning directly from the manuals. With old languages (C, Perl, JavaScript, ...) it was hard to be disciplined enough to write maintainable code. Newer languages (Go, Rust, Swift, ...) were developed to help with that (and they do!) but it is depressing to see that so many projects are writing sloppy code while pretending that the new languages automagically lead to "good" software. (btw. I went through my education at ETH but am just too young to have been to lectures by Niklaus Wirth himself. However, his influence still showed through his disciples and the curriculum.)

@raboczi@bne.social @seachaint@masto.hackers.town @rootwyrm@weird.autos @jackwilliambell@rustedneuron.com @cstross@wandering.shop I am all for using (and designing) systems that require less discipline. However, you still need to know what you are doing. My comment may be misleading in that I did not intend to blame anyone for lack of discipline. The newer systems that require less discipline needed to be built first (and they grew out of the experience with the old tools). It is however depressing to see that people (including with the help of AI) still produce lower quality result. This is in part the effect of lowering the bar and enabling many more people to use the new tools. The kind of developers who could muster the discipline needed in the old days are still producing better results now with the new systems and they tend to appreciate the improved tooling.