alt Hacker NewsIf you’re just talking about learning a programming language I think you need to be quite judicious in your AI usage.
In my experience, people learn programming languages best by overcoming frustrating roadblocks. You often end up learning something important, even if it’s just about your mindset or approach, that landed you there. This is the difference between someone with a wet signature on their comp sci diploma and someone with a few years under their belt.
A lot of people start with tutorials and cargo-cult their way through solving their first problems, but eventually need to learn how to do things the tutorial code can’t. It seems like the AI coding tools can could perpetually make things that could be bashed together well enough to sorta solve a problem and think “oh I’ll just learn about that later,” and then never learn about it at all. If your goal is to make some quick tool to help you with something at work in a different field, well, touchdown. If you’re trying to learn the language, fail.
Replies
I’ve seen people here learn programming languages by building a compiler, but my go-to project is usually the ICFP 2006 contest. It has a well defined scope, it is entertaining, gets you into the advanced concepts pretty fast as you debug and optimize performance.
>> If you’re trying to learn the language, fail.
AI-coding tools are the deepl/gtranslate of coding. they might help you understand a foreign website/text better but you wont learn the language with it. and you will continue to be reliant on them until you learn the language. So when you dont have internet access etc.
For programming, this was already true for many programmers before LLM. I wasnt able to do much without access to stackoverflow. especially with more complex tasks that i had no experience working with before. Its one thing to figure out an elegant solution to a concrete task, but often it was remembering integrations, libraries, adapters and packages i dindt often work with.
So i agree fully, learning a language takes time. The central question is, why are you learning the language? for personal development? for understanding the process the LLM is solving for you? for deep optimization?
i can do a fluent translation from german to english for my GF, but sometimes its too exhausting and i paste a text into a translator (or llm) and just read the english text. The same is true for coding. When nuance is important you might want to have a skilled programmer look over what you generated.
BTW does anyone use the LLM to directly generate assember code :D