How pessimistic you are on this subject depends on how much you believe in domain transfer for these tools. No programming language sprung out of a vacuum, and it seems reasonable to think that a LLM sufficiently trained on all the C++, Haskell, and OCaml in the world could probably do a decent job at writing Rust, even if it had never seen it before, given the rust compiler as a tool and rust documentation as input
It certainly does worry me, though. As does the increasing amount of materials and manuals that seem to be written assuming the LLMs will be the (only? primary?) audience
It's hard to articulate why, but 35 layers of deterministic abstraction feels very different from 1 layer of nondeterministic one.
In particular, I think every developer has experienced the need to jump "down the stack" to debug or understand something (even if not all the way down). Certainly, I think any senior developer should be at least conversant in the first few levels below wherever they "live". But this seemingly ends up looking fundamentally different in the interaction mode of an LLM, because you'd just ask it to jump down the stack for you
what’s wrong with make is largely that people are bad at writing makefiles. A tool like dune is able to enable cross compilation of a massive number of libraries out of the box, but make based projects that weren’t designed with it in mind almost always require someone to go through and separate out the mess of what needs to run on the host vs be built for the target, etc, etc
I think that’s not true; vanilla OCaml is already a competitor to Go, etc. OxCaml is explicitly an effort to compete more with Rust (the “Ox” in the name is to evoke “oxidizing” = rusting)
2026 is the year I stop reading blogs with headers like “The big unlock:”
It is rude to share AI written text for others to read. You are violating a social norm that has existed implicitly forever, that you invested at least as much effort in producing some text as you are asking me to put in to reading it
I could imagine something like the mastodon protocol but for git forges, where even though they are separate websites there would be no true boundary to discoverability/interaction
You’re not putting a municipal grocery store on the same block as an existing big box and saying “wow, savings!”
Food deserts exist in NYC, and many New Yorkers buy staples at corner stores that charge significantly more than a standard grocery store. Your second paragraph implies that this policy is due to some dislike of existing grocery stores, but that assumes these communities are actually being currently served by grocers at all
I am a recent 5070ti purchaser so I'm also feeling lucky, though if they exit the gaming market entirely I suspect the drivers will all go to crap soon thereafter
The poor resale market for EVs just means that people who actually have some understanding of the battery lifespans can get very good deals on 1-2 year old cars
There are some interesting experiments going on in the OCaml world that involve what they call 'modes', essentially a second type system for how a value is used separate from what it is. One goal of modes is to solve this problem. It ends up looking a bit like opting-in to a Rust-style borrow-checker for the relevant functions
Yeah, I think people find C appealing because it feels like you can fit the whole language in your head. I’ve yet to meet someone who has actually accomplished this in practice
Isn’t that due to different reasons (like the end of production for older standards)? I recall the same happening shortly after manufacturing for DDR3 ceased, before eventually demand essentially went to 0
Yes, the opam repository has recently been working on an archival policy to reduce the size of the checkout and hopefully ease pressure on the dependency resolver by pruning 'obviously' wrong choices. However, the heuristic they chose seems to have mainly assumed that the things in the repository are libraries, and used dependencies for tracking usages. For executables like dune, this is obviously the wrong idea, and I think they're still deciding how to proceed while adding back most versions
Either a lot of clones or a lot of reference counted pointers. Especially if your point of comparison is a GC language, this is much less of a crime than some people think
It certainly does worry me, though. As does the increasing amount of materials and manuals that seem to be written assuming the LLMs will be the (only? primary?) audience