People with this view seem to forget that writing code by hand is fun. Most of the experienced programmers I know only use AI to skip the actual boring parts (some boilerplate, the occasional “duplicate this module and change some details”, stuff like that) and some of them don’t use AI at all. One of them is required to use AI by his job and he says most of his co-workers don’t like it.

The opposing viewpoints are there and I’m sure NYT knows it.

For 1: as a software company, they have a vested interest in ensuring that software engineers are as capable as possible. I don’t know if anthropic as a company uses this as a guiding principle, but certainly some companies do (ex Jane Street). So they might see this as more important than investment cycles.

The quality of software engineers and computer scientists I’ve seen coming out of undergraduate programs in the last year has been astonishingly poor compared to 2-3 years ago. I think it’s almost guaranteed that the larger companies have also noticed this.

In terms of “computational complexity” we mean the following:

Consider the following generalization of Sudoku. There is a number, N, and a grid of squares with N² squares per side. (So the grid in total has N⁴ squares.) Each row and column of the grid has N² squares. The grid therefore contains an N² number of NxN subgrids (this corresponds to the 3x3 boxes in regular sudoku, called Houses). The puzzle is to fill each row, column, and house with the numbers from 1 to N² with no duplicates.

The complexity is then a measure of how much harder the puzzles get when N is increased. Sudoku is a classic example of a so-called “NP-Hard” problem. Most puzzles that people think of as difficult are NP-hard. The ELI5 is that given a claimed solution to a sudoku puzzle, you can check if it really is the solution quickly (where again “quickly” is in terms of N). This is not true for the hardest types of puzzles in the witness.

This is only a proxy for how difficult humans will find the smaller puzzles but it’s remarkably accurate. The hardest puzzles using every mechanic from the witness (realistically, only using two of them including the last one) are going to be much harder for a human than the hardest sudokus.

People underestimate how hard the puzzles are. In computational complexity terms, the hardest puzzles in the witness are harder than sudoku.

That’s national. A source on Québec-specific cost inflation would be better, if it refutes the number in the article.

Of course as far as the CAD itself goes, inflation being lower than 3.1% already makes it suspicious to approve such a significantly larger increase. :/

I don’t mean this in a bad way; did an AI write this comment?

For those unaware, HP recently secured one of the most idiotic deals I have ever seen a state-level government agree to: all laptops in Quebec purchased with public funds must be HP laptops. They said this will “encourage competition in the laptop market.”

I can’t wait to see this new decision blow up in HP’s face.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

Clickbait.

Yeah it depends what you’re doing. I do a lot of circuit modeling where different subsystems need to talk to each other. The solutions are either Rcs (and a bunch of custom drop logic) or a parent struct holding all the others. Both are awkward. But in other programming domains I’ve found rust pleasant.

Eh rust still has issues in some domains, e.g., when cyclic data is appropriate. You can do it, but it’s annoying. To me, Haskell is really peak programming, but I know that’s opinionated and most won’t agree.

Vscode can do cross-file renames in pretty much any language. An LSP that doesn’t support this is not doing its job.

Obra Dinn and outer wilds are two of my top 3 games ever made. If you liked outer wilds I’m pretty sure you’ll like Obra Dinn.

Blue prince is great until you “win” the first time. After that, imo, it starts falling off. Slowly at first, then harder. I have completionist friends to whom I have given it negative reviews. But if you just want to win and explore the space for a while, even potentially hundreds of hours if you don’t use guides, it’s fun. Don’t start a game day aiming to work on something specific. Work on what comes your way, and it is easily possible to make substantial progress every single game day.

The C Preprocessor also does all of those things. That’s expected of a preprocessor. If you say “you can write java code with a bit of extra sugar and JPlus turns it back into ‘regular’ java,” then that’s a preprocessor.

I don’t think anyone’s calling it a scam, but it’s pretty clear as an outside observer that a very specific point was questioned (about where JPlus fits into the existing ecosystem) and your replies have very little to do with that topic.

Also, your replies really do look AI-written. I know it’s hard to be sure, but humans expressing a point don’t usually write summaries in the fashion of your replies and LLMs almost always do.

Anyway, personally, if I have an existing application java program then maybe there’d be an argument to use a lightweight syntax extension to continue developing it more safely. But if I were starting a new project, whether a library or application, I would just use Scala or Kotlin from the get-go. The JVM platform is already versatile enough to get us much more than just some basic extra type safety and boilerplate generation. I’m all for static analysis tools, it’s just (again) hard to see what you get from JPlus that you can’t get from either groovy or a better language.

Your replies don’t address that at all.

I don’t need syntax highlighting for that in Haskell either. My usual highlighting just leaves them both in the default text color.

And I’m specifically arguing that the other things on your list do not inherently make code bad.

Raymond’s document does not, and I believe never has, mentioned Haskell.

I also disagree with him, given that it does recommend Java, but the quote is correct.

The only things on the bad list that I agree with are top-level type inference and small communities. And ocamls windows support is terrible. Haskell’s is more than ok now.

In Haskell, any style guide worth its salt requires annotations on top level functions, and many of them also require annotations on local bindings. This pretty effectively works around the problem.

Bad code will be unreadable in any language of course. But the other things don’t themselves make code unreadable once you’re actually familiar with the language and its ecosystem.

What does any of this have to do with LLMs?

I mean I agree with the conclusion but the confused people here are… people. I think if you ask an LLM about the “common name Rach,” it’ll also tell you that you probably mean Rachel.

I believe you didn’t intend to, but you did claim it, twice. Hence why the commenter I initially replied to (in which I guessed you meant the common _nick_name) was confused.

Then you replied to me saying “it’s literally from the bible [so it’s a common name]” implying that you disagreed with me about it being a nickname and you did really mean it as a given name.

Hopefully that explains the confusion.

Rachel is a very common given name. “Rach” is a fairly common nickname for it. “Rach” is not a common given name. (This matches what I said above.)

I just took a look at some baby name sites to try and find some statistics. I actually can’t find a single person named “Rach” because all the sites assume I want statistics for the long form, even when I’m on the page for “Rach” and they also have a page for “Rachel.” I’m interpreting this as being given the short form as your name is extremely rare.

Given that OP says this is a common English name (it’s not), I have to imagine that they’re referring to the common short form of Rachel. Pronounced as just the first syllable.