rottytooth/Olympus: The language where computation happens through the will of the gods

HTML Is Actually a Programming Language. Fight Me | WIRED

When haters deny HTML’s status as a programming language, they’re showing they don’t understand what a language really is. Language is not instructing an interlocutor what to do in a way that leaves no room for other interpretations; it is better and richer than that. Like human language, HTML is conversational. It is remarkably adept at adapting to context. It can take a different shape on any machine, from a desktop browser or an e-reader screen to a mobile app or a screen reader for the blind (so long as that device is built to present hypertext).

Hell, yeah!

Ultimately, even as HTML has become the province of professionals, it cannot be gatekept. This is what makes so many programmers so anxious about the web, and sometimes pathetically desperate to maintain the all-too-real walls they’ve erected between software engineers and web developers.

Hell, yeeeeaaaaahhh!!!

What other programmers might say dismissively is something HTML lovers embrace: Anyone can do it. Whether we’re using complex frameworks or very simple tools, HTML’s promise is that we can build, make, code, and do anything we want.

Generative AI Is Not Going To Build Your Engineering Team For You - Stack Overflow

People act like writing code is the hard part of software. It is not. It never has been, it never will be. Writing code is the easiest part of software engineering, and it’s getting easier by the day. The hard parts are what you do with that code—operating it, understanding it, extending it, and governing it over its entire lifecycle.

The present wave of generative AI tools has done a lot to help us generate lots of code, very fast. The easy parts are becoming even easier, at a truly remarkable pace. But it has not done a thing to aid in the work of managing, understanding, or operating that code. If anything, it has only made the hard jobs harder.

Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

A very thought-provoking presentation from Maggie on how software development might be democratised.

I worry our Copilot is leaving some passengers behind - Josh Collinsworth blog

Products of all kinds are required to ensure misuse is discouraged, at a minimum, if not difficult or impossible. I don’t see why LLMs should be any different.

LLMs and Programming in the first days of 2024

What strikes me about my personal experience with LLMs is that I have learned precisely when to use them and when their use would only slow me down. I have also learned that LLMs are a bit like Wikipedia and all the video courses scattered on YouTube: they help those with the will, ability, and discipline, but they are of marginal benefit to those who have fallen behind. I fear that at least initially, they will only benefit those who already have an advantage.