Programmer Humor

Fellow tech-trash-disposal-engineer here. I've made a killing on replacing corporate anti-patterns. My career features such hits and old-time classics like:

• email as workflow
• email as version control
• email as project management
• email as literally anything other than email
• excel as an relational database
• excel as project management
• help, our wiki is out of control
• U-drive as a multi-user collaboration solution
• The CEO's nephew wrote this 8 years ago and we can't get rid of it

In all of these cases, there were always better answers that maybe just cost a little bit more. AI will absolutely cause some players to train-wreck their business, all to save a buck, and we'll all be there to help clean up. Count on it.

'I want you to make me a Facebook-killer app with agentive AI and blockchains. Why is that so hard for you code monkeys to understand?'

Even writing an RFC for a mildly complicated feature to mostly describe it takes so many words and communication with stakeholders that it can be a full time job. Imagine an entire app.

Ironically, one of the universal things I've noticed in programmers (myself included) is that newbie coders always go through a phase of thinking "why am I writing SQL? I'll write a set of classes to write the SQL for me!" resulting in a massively overcomplicated mess that is a hundred times harder to use (and maintain) than a simple SQL statement would be. The most hilarious example of this I ever saw was when I took over a young colleague's code base and found two classes named "OR.cs" and "AND.cs". All they did was take a String as a parameter, append " OR " or " AND " to it, and return it as the output. Very forward-thinking, in case the meanings of "OR" and "AND" were ever to change in future versions of SQL.

So is COBOL.

(Is there any sane alternative to SQL?)

Nowadays they are maybe one tier above fast food workers.

:-/

Having worked both jobs, I could point to a few differences

That environment was wild though. At the time, you basically needed to be an electrical engineer and/or a licensed HAM operator, just to have your head wrapped around how it all worked. Familiarity with the very electronics of the thing, even modifying the hardware directly when needed, was crucial to operating that old tech.

Well to be fair if you're a programmer in the 70s you might as well be a genius.

Well let me tell you, the things built in the vibe-cpdong paradigm will have consequences

Hiding the complexity behind nice interfaces makes it actually more difficult to understand programming.

This is a very important point, that most of my colleagues with OOP background seem to miss. They build a bunch of abstractions and then say it's easy, because we have one liner in calling code, pretending that the rest of the code doesn't exist. Oh yes, it certainly exists! And needs to be maintained, too.

the general public has failed to learn programming

That's like saying that the general public has failed to learn surgery, or the general public has failed to learn chemical engineering.

There are certain things that it just doesn't make sense for the general public to ever be expected to learn.

What if the 2030s change the approach and use AI to teach everybody how to program?

What does AI (already known to be an unreliable bullshitting machine) provide to students that existing tutorials, videos and teachers do not already?

Also the companies investing in AI are not trying to teach their workers to be better, they're trying to make more profit by replacing workers or artificially increasing their outputs. Teaching people to program is not what they care about

I find this to be a real problem with visual shaders. I know how certain mathematical formulas affect an input, but instead of just pressing the Enter key and writing it down, I now have to move blocks around, and oh no, they were nicely logically aligned, now one block is covering another block, oh noo, what a mess and the auto sort thing messes up the logical sorting completly… well too bad.

And I find that most solutions on the internet utilizing the visual editor tend to forget that previous outputs can be reused. Getting normals from already generated noise without resampling somehow becomes arcane knowledge.

Edit: words.

My company recently acquired another firm that tried to outsource the entire IT department and proceeded to shit itself to death.

Go ahead cowards. Replace me with a computer. I will become more powerful than you could ever imagine.

And then it'll all go to shit and proper programmers will be able to charge bank to sort it out.

Software engineering is a mindset, a way of doing something while thinking forward (and I don’t mean just scalability), at least if you want it done with quality. Today you can’t vibe code but proofs of concept, prototypes that are in no way ready for production.

I don’t see current LLMs overcoming this soon. It appears that they’ve reached their limits without achieving general AI, which is what truly would obsolete programmers, and humans in general.