Comment by abixb
5 hours ago
Imagine going back in time to late-80s/early-90s, and vividly describing all the tools we have now to folks back then -- coding agents, loops, autonomous multi-hour agentic workflows, automated testing, and PRs, and whatnot. Wonder what their reaction would be.
I sometimes look at my pre-2024 workflows and feel like I'm looking at a caveman's toolchain. Absolutely bonkers as to how quickly we humans adapt to things.
Also, neat bit of trivia: Borland was originally named MIT ("Market In Time"). The OG MIT in Cambridge, MA, sent a trademark letter and they then changed their name to Borland, which was supposedly a client of theirs.
Imagine going back in time to late-80s/early-90s, and vividly describing all the tools we have now to folks back then -- coding agents, loops, autonomous multi-hour agentic workflows, automated testing, and PRs, and whatnot. Wonder what their reaction would be. I sometimes look at my pre-2024 workflows and feel like I'm looking at a caveman's toolchain. Absolutely bonkers as to how quickly we humans adapt to things.
It’s complicated. Especially because we had a huge regression in programming from roughly the mid-90s until recently.
In the early 90s I used Turbo Pascal as a kid. It was an editor with an awesome built-in debugger, profiler, online help, super fast compiler. This all culminated into Delphi, which had all that and offered drag-and-drop UI building.
Programming regressed a lot after the demise of Borland IDEs. Especially on Linux/Unix the tooling was very primitive in comparison.
In a very weird way, LLMs brought back a bit of these old environments in the sense that you can use one interface for programming, debugging and profiling. It just does more of the boring work for us (cross-referencing code, writing profiling cases, etc.
Other than that, LLMs, etc. would be so foreign for someone from the 80s that their minds would be blown and it would look like alien technology.
They would probably say, "That's nice dear, but we just got rid of the timesharing service and we're not going back to that just because you call it The Cloud. We just got perrsonal computers and we're not going back."
I'd like to go back to the 80s/90s and never come back, if I can get a programming job. Damn I would like to ride the wave that I totally missed.
If you tell them about javascript, they'll ask what Earth you're from in the Multiverse of Madness.