alt Hacker News> I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters into a computer...
Reminds me of this excerpt from Richard Hamming's book:
> Finally, a more complete, and more useful, Symbolic Assembly Program (SAP) was devised—after more years than you are apt to believe during which most programmers continued their heroic absolute binary programming. At the time SAP first appeared I would guess about 1% of the older programmers were interested in it—using SAP was “sissy stuff”, and a real programmer would not stoop to wasting machine capacity to do the assembly. Yes! Programmers wanted no part of it, though when pressed they had to admit their old methods used more machine time in locating and fixing up errors than the SAP program ever used. One of the main complaints was when using a symbolic system you do not know where anything was in storage—though in the early days we supplied a mapping of symbolic to actual storage, and believe it or not they later lovingly pored over such sheets rather than realize they did not need to know that information if they stuck to operating within the system—no! When correcting errors they preferred to do it in absolute binary addresses.
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I don't know what book you're talking about, but it seems that you intend to compare the switch to an AI-based workflow to using a higher-level language. I don't think that's valid at all. Nobody using Python for any ordinary purpose feels compelled to examine the resulting bytecode, for example, but a responsible programmer needs to keep tabs on what Claude comes up with, configure a dev environment that organizes the changes into a separate branch (as if Claude were a separate human member of a team) etc. Communication in natural language is fundamentally different from writing code; if it weren't, we'd be in a world with far more abundant documentation. (After all, that should be easier to write than a prompt, since you already have seen the system that the text will describe.)
Contra your other replies, I think this is exactly the point.
I had an inkling that the feeling existed back then, but I had no idea it was documented so explicitly. Is this quote from The Art of Doing Science and Engineering?
I think this is beside the point, because the crucial change with LLMs is that you don’t use a formal language anymore to specify what you want, and get a deterministic output from that. You can’t reason with precision anymore about how what you specify maps to the result. That is the modal shift that removes the “fun” for a substantial portion of the developer workforce.