Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Merry Christmas, happy Hannukah, and happy holidays in general!)
So maybe I'm just showing my lack of actual dev experience here, but isn't "making code modifications algorithmically at scale" kind of definitionally the opposite of good software engineering? Like, I'll grant that stuff is complicated but if you're making the same or similar changes at some massive scale doesn't that suggest that you could save time, energy and mental effort by deduplicating somewhere?
The short answer is no. Outside of this context, I'd say the idea of "code modifications algorithmically at scale" is the intersection of code generation and code analysis, all of which are integral parts of modern development. That being said, using LLMs to perform large scale refactors is stupid.
I think I'm with Haunted's intuition in that I don't really buy code generation. (As in automatic code generation.) My understanding was you build a thing that takes some config and poops out code that does certain behaviour. But could you not build a thing instead, that does the behaviour directly?
I know people who worked on a system like that, and maybe there's niches where it makes sense. Just seems like it was a SW architecture fad 20 years ago, and some systems are locked into that know. It doesn't seem like the pinnacle of engineering to me.
@jaschop
"But could you not build a thing instead, that does the behaviour directly?"
Back in the day NeXT's Interface Builder let you connect up and configure "live" UI objects, and then freeze-dry them to a file, which would be rehydrated at runtime to recreate those objects (or copies of them if you needed more.)
Apple kept this for a while but doesn't really do it anymore. There were complications with version control, etc.
I have always felt like NeXT/OS X Interface Builder has serious "path not taken" energy, but the fact that OpenStep/Cocoa failed to become a generalized multiplatform API, as well as the version control issues for the .nib format (never gave much thought to that, but it makes sense) sadly doomed it. And most mobile apps are glorified web pages, each with their own bespoke interface to maintain "brand identity," so it could be argued there's less than zero demand there for the flexibility (and complexity!) that Interface Builder could enable.