• Kissaki@programming.dev
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      2 days ago

      00:00 Intro
      00:48 Why write a compiler in JavaScript
      07:29 Why rewrite the compiler in Go
      14:49 LLMs for large migrations
      20:12 Why Javascript is so popular
      26:32 Why ever use Javascript on the backend
      32:59 What it takes to build a programming language
      37:06 Will there be fewer languages in 10 years
      42:57 Hands on engineering vs delegation
      49:14 Why fast tooling matters more now
      51:16 AI software engineering predictions
      58:52 The most technically challenging work
      01:02:04 Top book recommendation
      01:03:50 Advice for his younger self
      01:05:00 Outro

      Just summarizing the title teasers:

      10x faster by switching from JavaScript to Golang. Rust was not feasible because it does not have a GC/does not support circular dependencies, and they have many of those, and did not want a rewrite but a minimal effort switch.

      AI may produce a lot more code, but what code does “90% of code” refer to. AI is not capable of novel or complex stuff, you still need humans in the loop. Juniors remain significant to train them into seniors.

      • hallettj@leminal.space
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        2 days ago

        Thanks for the summary! Initially I thought the headline was about writing Typescript programs 10x faster.

      • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
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        23 hours ago

        AI is not capable of novel or complex stuff,

        This seems to be both untrue and mostly irrelevant.

        The recent FLT proof is clearly complex and novel.

        But also a huge amount of programming is only barely complex and not really novel at all.

        The biggest issues I’ve seen with AI so far are:

        • The slop comments are just painful to read. I think this might mostly be Claude though, I recently switched to Codex and it’s way less annoying.
        • It is so benchmaxxed to “succeed at all costs” it will often do stupid things just to make the test pass or whatever. To be fair a lot of humans are like that - “I dunno but it seems to work” attitude.