It Bears Repeating
I know I've addressed this topic in the past, but it bears repeating, because there's either overly fervent tech-optimism or a fundamental lack of understanding of LLMs (or both, I guess). I recently encountered this article about the approach of the death of the programming language. It starts off with the usual straw man argument that compilers obviated the need to understand machine language, that VMs increased the level of abstraction even further, and that LLMs now (or soon will) preclude us from needing to understand high-level languages. Except this isn't true. The first evolutions dealt with deterministic tools. If you're writing in C and compile the code to something machine-readable, you can be reasonably certain that the same input will produce the same output. The universe (and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics) being what it is, this isn't entirely correct. Bugs exist in compilers, and things like cosmic radiation can actually affect behavior. But...