Yes, but quality takes actual skill to measure, instead of just a diff.

(Although I guess lines are still better than time in office)

And even this improvement wasn’t universally appreciated: some people found error messages they couldn’t ignore more annoying than wrong results, and, when judging the relative merits of programming languages, some still seem to equate “the ease of programming” with the ease of making undetected mistakes.

This guy was writing in the year x86 was first introduced, and I still feel like I see this attitude around.

(He manages to shoehorn in a “kids these days” paragraph too, though)

All he made was some dinky algorithm. Google Bard could do that in three minutes flat smh.

Thx for sharing this . Really hope people read it.

See, Dijkstra was talking about people trying to create programs in natural language. He didn’t say not to use your natural language to hire someone else to make a formal program. This is people using natural language to hire an LLM to make a formal program, and asking LLMs is like asking people, so it’s Dijkstra-approved.

My managers are supposed to be skilled?

Rust & cargo do more than just compile. For example, it basically has buit-in ccache.

It is also easier to split large libraries into multiple crates, though an average project still uses more libraries than an equivalent C project. I wouldn’t be surprised if the “AI” also pulled in more libraries than needed, or has unnecessary library features enabled. I’m pretty sure that a cargo plugin for pruning unused libraries was featured on the rust blog, as a featured third-party plugin for a cargo release.

Amen.

Safety critical (aerospace, medical, precious few other) industries have regulated quality, with moderate success. It’s far from perfect, farther from ideal, but it is providing some additional resource and schedule allocation to do the things that need doing to ensure the systems don’t screw up too badly, too often.

One of my junior devs was having trouble with a bug in an internally developed tool, apparently for weeks before I saw her struggling with it over her shoulder - it was a 5 minute fix, I hope I made it clear to her: speak up when something’s wrong - this 5 minute fix has cost you many hours already because you never told me you were having a problem.

In the 80s the hand written assembly was more reliable and performant than the C, at least on many of the compilers.

Even in 1990, I tried to launch a serious project in C++ on the IBM-PC, and the best available compiler was too buggy to use. It did fine for little demo apps, but by the time you wrote code for 2 weeks, you started hitting bugs - not in your code but in the compiler output… we had to fall back to C for the project. Even later, around 1994, we had two C compilers for 6811 work and one of them was garbage, I could hand write the assembly better and faster without even trying hard. The other one was pretty good, and by the late 1990s I stopped looking at C/C++ compilers’ assembly output because it was consistently better than I would write by hand.

is there any other kind?

The SOTA changes every couple weeks, but Claude’s been very dominant for a while, yeah. There’s currently a lot of hype around GPT-5.4, but even then there’s a caveat that Claude is still better at UI.

I just personally find Cursor to be pretty buggy. But I think the Replit mention is more of a tell that someone vibe codes but doesn’t actually code. It’s been advertised to people as a way to build end to end apps without any coding experience. And to be fair, they’ve done a good job of building on the past decade of work in the Typescript community to make an entire app end to end type safe and therefore checkable by the compiler. Convex has done something similar in a way that I prefer and in my experience LLMs are very good at working in Convex projects as well.

Really at the end of the day I was just being pithy. Kind of poking fun at how much of a moving target SOTA is.