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0 pointshumanistbot3y ago0 comments

Why not? The profession went from writing machine code by hand to auditing "auto-generated" machine code from assembly. And so on with every generation of programming languages. With every new higher-level language with new abstractions, we're often just adding another chain to the inputs to a machine code translator.

Edit: If you showed a programmer from the 1950s python syntax and told them that all you have to do is write these words to build a program, they'd think it was artificial intelligence.

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IncRnd3y ago

  > Why not? The profession went from writing machine code by
  hand to auditing "auto-generated" machine code from
  assembly.

A compiler determistically creates assembly through a set of rules not through AI. You absolutely cannot compare these two in that way.

  > Edit: If you showed a programmer from the 1950s python
  syntax and told them that all you have to do is write these
  words to build a program, they'd think it was artificial
  intelligence.

I guarantee you that your bias is a complete misunderstanding. People today are not more intelligent compared to people then. People are people, and programmers in the 1950s had to be extremely clever.

kaba03y ago

Especially that our field foundations wasn’t shaken to the core in the last 70 years, when around the century there was a huge change in understanding.. everything. Gödel, Turing machines, Chomsky, Halting theorem, etc. That we no longer has to fit into 3 megabytes and thus can write some monster abstractions is not fundamentally different at all.

h0l0cube3y ago

> Edit: If you showed a programmer from the 1950s python syntax and told them that all you have to do is write these words to build a program, they'd think it was artificial intelligence.

I think you might be underestimating programmers in the 1950s.

> The first practical compiler was written by Corrado Böhm in 1951 for his PhD thesis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_compiler_constructi...

xmprt3y ago

I don't think the GP is underestimating programmers in the 1950s but rather commenting on their definition of AI. Back then first order logic was considered AI to a lot of people. I feel like in 50 years, AI models will become so complex and sophisticated that they will look back at us surprised that we ever considered ChatGPT to be an AI since it fails at basic logic tasks like the event ordering example above.

TeMPOraL3y ago

> Edit: If you showed a programmer from the 1950s python syntax and told them that all you have to do is write these words to build a program, they'd think it was artificial intelligence.

Well, if you showed a programmer from late 1960s / early 1970s that same thing, they'd show you Lisp and laugh you off, or despair that programming seemingly regressed in the future.

snickerbockers3y ago

>Edit: If you showed a programmer from the 1950s python syntax and told them that all you have to do is write these words to build a program, they'd think it was artificial intelligence.

he's a computer programmer, not a teutonnic knight.

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