[msteffen]

It’s nice to know that other people out there are as grumpy as I am (or can be), but I don’t think it’s particularly healthy.

Something I think about sometimes: the abstractions in math can be awfully elegant. Learning about them is probably 60% of the fun of studying math. But they took hundreds of years (or thousands in some cases) to conceive and refine. All that time was spent writing weird—often awkward and often wrong—proofs and trying every other idea that doesn’t work as well, and throwing them out (and still getting stuck with some of them, like pi instead of tau).

Software is less than a hundred years old. Eventually software will be quite elegant and make a lot of sense. Until then, we’re trying every idea we can think of (yaml templates) to see what’s good. Once AI can invent a programming language and reproduce decades of software development in it to test its design ideas, we can skip to the end.

[amelius]

If AI invents a programming language it will probably be targeted at AI, not humans ...

[balamatom]

I find it difficult to imagine that an AI would ever invent a programming language targeting anything other but permanent damage to the language faculty of its handlers.

[int_19h]

An AI trained on human outputs...