At the risk of being a bit of a douchebag, it seems like nearly every tech opinion piece I read now boils down to "things used to be hard but they aren't anymore because LLMs can understand things faster than we can, so can ignore/change fundamentals!"
I didn't really find the argument convincing the first time and I don't really find it convincing now.
That said, with regards to macros, I actually do agree that the fear against them is broadly overblown. I have seen scary terrible horrifying macro soup in Clojure, but that has generally been outlier cases. Something like core.async abuses the hell out of macros, and despite that I think it very often increases readability and understanding of the language.
smitty1e•1h ago
As long as GPS stays bullet proof, Navies are in good shape.
It's going to be a hard come-to-Beevis moment if the magic signal goes away and people have to remember celestial navigation.
Not sure you can even find a sextant on most vessels.
So too these AI services.
QuesnayJr•1h ago
The Navy was phasing out celestial navigation, but after some public outrage from retired naval officers they brought it back.
manyatoms•1h ago
Does this mean using the star-tracking devices like what satellites have, or like a human paper/pen thing?
obviouslynotme•30m ago
It should mean both. They need to learn how to do it by hand and then learn how to lean on a navigation system. If only GPS fails, then the celestial navigation program fallback runs without a hitch. If shit hits the fan, then they can break out the manual and remember how to do it by hand.
fragmede•30m ago
GPS service is obviously going to go down whenever World War III goes hot, so the Navy is definitely training sailors on the alternatives.
nvme0n1p1•39m ago
And even if LLMs do our thinking for us, it's still not a reason to fork the programming language you're using, unless you expect me to believe an LLM can understand `foo |> bar` but it can't understand `bar(foo(x))`. If you're not looking at the code, it doesn't matter how pretty the code is anymore.
tinlid•54m ago
My last project needed Rust for one module, but the rest was Go. Felt silly rewriting core logic just to stay unified.
pie_flavor•52m ago
Rust has been a practical experiment in macros for ten years now. I think it is safe to say the results are in: macros are great, and you just needed to have a better style of macros. Making and using something like `tokio::select!` in C-style macros is miserable, but `tokio::select!` is easy to use and understand in Rust.
brinepot•22m ago
Moving from Java to Kotlin was a breath of fresh air; sometimes a language change genuinely unlocks productivity.
tombert•1h ago
I didn't really find the argument convincing the first time and I don't really find it convincing now.
That said, with regards to macros, I actually do agree that the fear against them is broadly overblown. I have seen scary terrible horrifying macro soup in Clojure, but that has generally been outlier cases. Something like core.async abuses the hell out of macros, and despite that I think it very often increases readability and understanding of the language.
smitty1e•1h ago
It's going to be a hard come-to-Beevis moment if the magic signal goes away and people have to remember celestial navigation.
Not sure you can even find a sextant on most vessels.
So too these AI services.
QuesnayJr•1h ago
manyatoms•1h ago
obviouslynotme•30m ago
fragmede•30m ago
nvme0n1p1•39m ago