We are still doing a stupid amount of low level stuff (at least in our heads) now. I thought end 70/80s, with lisp, apl and even basic that we didn’t need to worry about memory management, cycle mangement, etc, anymore, but now, half a century later, we still have to, because if you don’t, everything is laggy, leaky, OOMing, killing the browser, eating the battery, costing stupid cloud $ etc.
The abstractions often suck so much that I long for the manual stuff (and do when I am doing embedded programming for 20kb 2mhz devices); it is usually far more enjoyable as you can reason about it in a very goal oriented way.
And yes, abstracting a human problem to something logical was always the actual job of programming and that will remain for a while; LLMs are terrible at it so far. When your brain manages to cut it up in small pieces of logic, LLMs do puke out the code that fits with bizarre speed. That code often suffers from not taking into account performance and memory management though, and thus make up a terrible app in the end.
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We are still doing a stupid amount of low level stuff (at least in our heads) now. I thought end 70/80s, with lisp, apl and even basic that we didn’t need to worry about memory management, cycle mangement, etc, anymore, but now, half a century later, we still have to, because if you don’t, everything is laggy, leaky, OOMing, killing the browser, eating the battery, costing stupid cloud $ etc.
The abstractions often suck so much that I long for the manual stuff (and do when I am doing embedded programming for 20kb 2mhz devices); it is usually far more enjoyable as you can reason about it in a very goal oriented way.
And yes, abstracting a human problem to something logical was always the actual job of programming and that will remain for a while; LLMs are terrible at it so far. When your brain manages to cut it up in small pieces of logic, LLMs do puke out the code that fits with bizarre speed. That code often suffers from not taking into account performance and memory management though, and thus make up a terrible app in the end.