• DarkCloud@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    32
    ·
    13 hours ago

    Hot take, people will look back on anyone who currently codes, as we look back on the NASA programmers who got the equipment and people to the moon.

    They won’t understand how they did so much with so little. You’re all gourmet chefs in a future of McDonalds.

    • @DarkCloud @dgerard

      The first commercial product I worked on had 128 bytes of RAM and 2048 bytes of ROM.

      It kept people safe from low oxygen, risk of explosions, and toxic levels of two poisonous gases including short term and long term effects at fifteen minutes and eight hour averages.

      Pre-Internet. When you’re doing something new or pushing the limits, you just have to know how to code and read the datasheets.

    • shnizmuffin@lemmy.inbutts.lol
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      37
      ·
      10 hours ago

      Nah, we’re plumbers in an age where everyone has decided to DIY their septic system.

      Please, by all means, keep it up.

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        edit-2
        2 hours ago

        You say that, but as an operator->sysadmin->devops I’m increasingly disconcerted by the rise of “devops” who can’t actually find their way around a Unix command prompt.

      • whats_all_this_then@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        4 hours ago

        This is dead on! 99% of the fucking job is digital plumbing so the whole thing doesn’t blow the up when (a) there’s a slight deviation from the “ideal” data you were expecting, or (b) the stakeholders wanna make changes at the last minute to a part of the app that seems benign but is actually the crumbling bedrock this entire legacy monstrosity was built upon. Both scenarios are equally likely.

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      ·
      11 hours ago

      Hot take, people will look back on anyone who currently codes, as we look back on the NASA programmers who got the equipment and people to the moon.

      I doubt it’ll be anything that good for them. By my guess, those who currently code are at risk of suffering some guilt-by-association problems, as the AI bubble paints them as AI bros by proxy.

      • Architeuthis@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        edit-2
        3 hours ago

        I think most people will ultimately associate chatbots with corporate overreach rather rank-and-file programmers. It’s not like decades of Microsoft shoving stuff down our collective throat made people think particularly less of programmers, or think about them at all.

    • corbin@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      10 hours ago

      Perhaps! But not because we adopted vibe coding. I do have faith in our ability to climb out of the Turing tarpit (WP, Esolangs) eventually, but only by coming to a deeper understanding of algorithmic complexity.

      Also, from a completely different angle: when I was a teenager, I could have a programmable calculator with 18MHz Z80 in my hand for $100. NASA programmers today have the amazing luxury of the RAD750, a 110MHz PowerPC chipset. We’re already past the gourmet phase and well into fusion.