Comment by ElFitz

4 hours ago

> Shitty will be the new normal.

I’ve heard the same from the best devs, and some who thought themselves to be the best, I’ve known long before LLMs were ever a thing.

I’m sure others heard the same when JavaScript and Python became near ubiquitous. When PHP emerged. When C supplanted Fortran and COBOL. When these two took over from Assembly. When punch cards went the way of the dodo.

There’s always someone for whom shitty is becoming the new normal. If that makes it a rule, what do we make of that rule?

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ElFitz

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StilesCrisis  2 hours ago

> I’m sure others heard the same when JavaScript and Python became near ubiquitous. When PHP emerged.

You heard right! Most JavaScript and PHP in the world _is_ profoundly shitty. It's taken 20 years of intense research to make JavaScript compilers that are almost good enough to mostly optimize away the design foibles of the language.

microtonal  4 hours ago

There are different magnitudes of shitty.

Also we went from compilers with an IDE that had a debugger, profiler, built-in help and would fit on a 3.5" disk and would load on machines with 640KiB RAM (Turbo Pascal) to chat apps or password managers that are hundreds of megabytes and regularly gobble up more than a gigabyte of memory because they ship with their own browser.

Something is lost along the way.

sersi  4 hours ago

To be fair with how powerful our computers are, it's a pity that electron apps like bitwarden, spotify are so slow and consume so much resources. I do miss the time when a lot of apps were snappy

  • nicce  1 hour ago

    I am just going to justify in the future that because of LLMs, there is no reason to use JavaScript, Java, Python etc anymore because of the available workforce. Only then when the technology itself is fit for the job.

freetanga  4 hours ago

Maybe it’s a process. Many of the transitions you mentioned did bring shitty apps (not all of them, the ones replacing tech for tech were mostly ok, the ones democratizing dev did come with a quality drop), but eventually Darwinism will take effect and trim the long tail.

Coding per se is not hard. Proper engineering is. I do hope this change brings a change in focus (people train in algorithms, efficiency, solid development patterns) but I am afraid it won’t be the case.