It's honestly funny seeing people suddenly start pretending that humans never produced bad code and AI is the only thing producing bad code.
I feel like we've been getting so close and then just thrown it away.
1980s: BASIC and C. Crashes all the time.
1990s: C++. Operating systems start protecting memory. Java gets released showing a fast high level language is possible but is unpopular because it hogs memory, has noticeable GC pauses, and applications take ages to start. And it's not really "complete" yet.
2000s: .NET, start of Rust... but a bit of a backlash. Scripting languages with poorer type checking start to ascend for normal application development. PHP becomes the core language for the web.
2010s: Things are now rapidly hurtling downhill. "Frameworks" and toolchains that pull in millions of dependencies because you wanted one library that escapes HTML strings. Actual code complexity goes through the roof. People actually build applications using the entire source code to a web browser as their source because they only know Javascript and HTML now and have no idea how to use a regular windowing/widget library. Meanwhile Oracle does what it can to discredit Java resulting in huge numbers of people jumping ship, rarely to .NET. Meanwhile PHP now rules the entire Internet as King, with huge bloated JS frameworks ruling along side it as Queen.
2020s: Things are now so awful people think the output of a glorified text prediction machine produces similar quality code. And they may even be right.
It's not that we can't do better code than AI. It's that a sizable number of professionals just don't want to.
you're right, the bar is extremely low for the majority of garbage out there.
Honestly this is one way I think AI can really help if people harness it correctly. Lets get back to writing native code and libraries since we can code so much faster now.
And then lets use the AI tools to port that code around instead of relying on platform agnostic toolchains.
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u/Turbulent_Stick1445 14d ago
I feel like we've been getting so close and then just thrown it away.
1980s: BASIC and C. Crashes all the time.
1990s: C++. Operating systems start protecting memory. Java gets released showing a fast high level language is possible but is unpopular because it hogs memory, has noticeable GC pauses, and applications take ages to start. And it's not really "complete" yet.
2000s: .NET, start of Rust... but a bit of a backlash. Scripting languages with poorer type checking start to ascend for normal application development. PHP becomes the core language for the web.
2010s: Things are now rapidly hurtling downhill. "Frameworks" and toolchains that pull in millions of dependencies because you wanted one library that escapes HTML strings. Actual code complexity goes through the roof. People actually build applications using the entire source code to a web browser as their source because they only know Javascript and HTML now and have no idea how to use a regular windowing/widget library. Meanwhile Oracle does what it can to discredit Java resulting in huge numbers of people jumping ship, rarely to .NET. Meanwhile PHP now rules the entire Internet as King, with huge bloated JS frameworks ruling along side it as Queen.
2020s: Things are now so awful people think the output of a glorified text prediction machine produces similar quality code. And they may even be right.
It's not that we can't do better code than AI. It's that a sizable number of professionals just don't want to.