I've noticed, as a student, that many college students - particularly those not in STEM/engineering fields - have an almost irrational hatred of AI. It's to the point where they'll mock you for using it, even when it provides such an insane productivity boost. I understand the disdain for trying to inject the concept everywhere, and like any new technology, it's apt to be used where it is unneeded, and mentioned when it is irrelevant.
But this luddite-like hatred needs also to be addressed. You can't turn your back on a helpful new technology just because it shakes things up. Students need to learn to use it more than constantly boo and ignore it. Especially those in non-STEM fields, where its usage might be more optional currently.
More realistically I think you'd need something like "Now write your post in the style of a space pirate" with a 10 second deadline, and then have another LLM checking if the two posts cover the same topic/subject but are stylistically appropriate.
Is this meant to detract from their situation? These tech stacks are mainstream because so many use them... it's only natural that AI would be the best at writing code in contexts where it has the most available training data.
More specific shenanigans aside, JavaScript will always be the king of unintuitive syntax. Some of these f-string tidbits are very much strange, but you'd have to be implementing something specific to encounter them. Meanwhile over in JS you're still waiting for your dependencies to install so you can compare two arrays.
Every now and then since deleting my account I click on a link to an X post and am reminded I can't read the replies, and then I am thankful again to my past self for deleting my account. I urge everyone to delete the app and their accounts, realistically there are just much better sources of information nowadays. It's not worth the mental headache to get your news from X, which recently honestly hasn't even been good at delivering it.
It's interesting, this concept of "just following orders" recurs so much in almost all contexts. War behavior really seems to be the baseline of human interaction.
Fair, but in the context of scripting, which seems to be the focus of this article, how often are you dealing with complex library code? When I write scripts for file manipulation / simple automation, I'm usually not dealing with complex library objects. Plenty of os method calls, plenty of regex matches, but little else in this context.
Big projects are another thing entirely. There's a plethora of reasons why you may want to use a different language for a certain project type. But it doesn't seem fair to imply that python is uniquely handicapped (or otherwise inferior to Java) for scripting and simple automation use-cases.
> but the Python API isn't all that wonderful, and dynamic typing means that I spend too much time debugging
I don't know, this just seems more like inertia. "I'd rather stick to what I know best than this popular thing." Which is fine, and I'm glad Java has made improvements making it easier to hit the ground running. But blaming the use of Java on the inadequacies of Python? The python API can do just about anything, it has regex toolings, I've never found myself needing anything else. And the typing complaints? Yeah it can be annoying if you're not good at keeping track of your own typing hints, but modern python supports type annotations and linters like mypy[1] catch everything related to that just fine.
I've always admired many of Java's features, but let's not act like the reason for using Java for scripting is the pitfalls of Python. It's just because of an underlying preference for Java.
Didn't know about pep 750, that's really cool that there's a push for native templating. I just hope we see a gradual stepping away of "everything clientside" and the JS framework hell that exists today. I've tried and I've tried but I just can't take javascript seriously. It's so ugly and overbuilt. It should never have been brought to the server, Node was a horrible mistake. In my ideal future, the web returns to servers doing their jobs, and JS being used for minor interactivity features when necessary.
But this luddite-like hatred needs also to be addressed. You can't turn your back on a helpful new technology just because it shakes things up. Students need to learn to use it more than constantly boo and ignore it. Especially those in non-STEM fields, where its usage might be more optional currently.