alt Hacker News> "That almost nobody has the skills these days to implement something like TP is something we could eventually come to regret – or, rather, our grandchildren could. Software development is becoming a semi-skilled industry, and I doubt that the rise of AI will entirely compensate for this."
I agree, but AI also there is hope!
For many years I've worried about the ever-growing depth of abstraction in computing. There are few alive now who actually understand all of the layers on abstraction involved in modern computing, and who can debug the truly strange edge case bugs and vulnerabilities introduced by the interoperation of these many complex layers.
For a time I imagined it to be an unsolvable problem, and that there would always be only a special class of neurodivergent hyper-specialists who still mostly had to work in large teams to even come close to understanding a stack in full. We're reaching the point where a single human lifespan just isn't enough to learn it all, even for those of us with what Dilbert called "The Knack". By the time you're proficient in all of it - you're dead.
Now there is a new kind of intelligence. One that CAN fit it all in a single mind, and one that will outlive us all and continue to learn long after our meat has gone bad.
As long as the AI's stay aligned, and we find ways to build them more efficiently there's a non-zero chance that they actually make it all better instead of worse. Genuinely long-term planning and the ability to TRULY grasp the full stack COULD actually happen. At least if we use these new systems in service of the greater good, and not just to play silly games on the stock market.
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AI is not trending towards small, minimal code with nice abstractions. It is faster at replicating "big team" code, but the code from a small team or a few authors still wins for elegance and simplicity.
There’s no substitute for human knowledge. What if the climate crisis gets to the point where we cannot justify boiling the ocean to perform tasks we’ve come to depend on?
What’s our disaster recovery strategy in the event of war and loss of internet?
Or worse yet, a near extinction event and we are forced to rebuild civilisation from memory?
Some of these might seem like extreme edge case scenarios but then history is full of disasters that people didn’t prepare for because they assumed they were too big to fail.
We do have free pascal and it looks pretty good I think.
>I agree, but AI also there is hope!
It's like a religion isn't it.
Or we could just ask them to build something less embarrassing?
I’m not sure where he got that idea. All I could learn about TP was like one book sold in one bookstore in my entire city. The barriers to entry back then were astronomically higher than they are today, especially given how AI has democratized access to information, knowledge, and expertise.
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AI isn't fundamentally different to us and it does benefit from abstractions. So, I don't think that's going to happen.
Besides, it's an exaggeration. I've been programming for 35 years, and Turbo Pascal was one of my first languages. I wrote OWL code! Seeing that splash screen brought back memories. But I can understand and debug problems that cross almost any layer of the software stack. Anything from some ReactJS library to kernel code to UEFI. I'm now 42 so the idea nobody can understand or debug interactions across layers before they die is for the birds. The stack isn't that deep.