They should be related to a #language#technology task, able to be automatically evaluated, with training and test #data able to be distributed to participants at low- or no-cost, and should be fun!
I just finished a productive Copilot session on a complex programming task. I came up with much of the algorithms, and wrote a lot of the code, and had to guide it a lot throughout, but credit where due, Copilot did make small but meaningful contributions along the way.
Overall, not a pair programmer but someone useful to talk to when WFH alone on complex tasks.
Enough for Copilot to earn a ✋🏽. And I like how it responded to that. It has got that part down. 😉
One thing that’s funny about #ai and #programming is I keep hearing the same thing. “Oh I use it for generic snippets, just common tasks and functions”.
The amusing thing about that is when I first started working with a #php app years ago there was already a solution to that problem. It was called “the PHP Cookbook” published by O’Reilly. I was told “oh we buy you a PDF copy and you just search for whatever you are trying to do and use that code. It saves a ton of time for junior programmers.”
Not only was it true, it did save me a ton of time and headaches, but we didn’t need to steal anything. The authors got paid, it worked offline, it didn’t require scraping the entirety of human knowledge to write or nuclear power plants worth of energy to distribute.
It also helped me learn. Since I would have a solid foundation to the solution, I felt more confident experimenting. I always had a known-functioning standard library solution as my base. So when something broke I knew where to start debugging.
Just an incredible thought that instead of paying $20 for a pdf once we decided this was the way to go.
@matdevdug I mean, pretending that CTRL+F and an AI are somewhat equivalent is not the argument you wanna be making.
Sure, reading a book and learning stuff is good and everyone should do it. But some problems are really specific and no book will have an example that you can find within few minutes.
@chrastecky Well as someone whose tried virtually every paid and free AI product on the market and can’t even get the paid Google Gemini one to return accurate results about their own Google Cloud libraries I’m gonna have to give it to CTRL-F.
They’re such unbelievable dogshit that Google cannot even make it as accurate as reading their own tests in their own client library. Imagine that. Reading the tests is easier and more reliable than asking an LLM. I didn’t even need to burn down a rainforest or make 12 more datacenters to do it.
When a programming language's website says it's a "general-purpose language", I already kind of want to not use it, because it probably won't offer anything that I can't get in another language.
I'd like to see a world where every language serves exactly one area of programming, and is highly specialized for that area.
@gregorni I like being guided by languages – forced, not just optinally. I find it reassuring. You see so many multi-paradigm languages. But I want to be called out for writing one part functional and another object oriented. Code that compiles and does what I want – okay – but clean code is just so much easier to maintain. And on that note, I just can't stand type inference. It's cool what the compiler understands, but do I, and do we agree? And yes, those catch all languages make you choose.
@camelCaseNick But this is a different problem. I'm not talking about the safety, convenience, or intelligence that a programming language may or may not come with. I'm simply talking about the type of programming tasks that a language is intended to be used for (AI, Game Development, Systems Programming, Data Science, Embedded Systems). In this context I find being "General Purpose" a disadvantage, since you can't specialize in any specific area, or add features that only benefit that area.
I've been trying to make this work for a few days and finally I achieved it, the most basic form of a wayland client using unix sockets, and well in other languages it was not difficult at all, I did it in hare, c, typescript (deno), and in the end I wanted to try with a language that I had never used, Haskell, and I learned many things but I still don't know what a monod is, anyway, here I leave a link to the code for those who are interested: https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/3711372 #haskell#programming#wayland
Please, web app developers, consider how your users will upgrade. If your upgrade process is "remove the old one, unzip the new one", then it's not an upgrade process. It's an encouragement to never upgrade.
I can integrate it in my app to deploy it in production.
I need to have a git repo on the server (mainly for private repo). And it configurable with y'all config.
But with a cli command, the component will:
creates an export of given tag
extracts it in some place
runs composer install
can run some other commands
copies secret files into app dir
create a symlink (for apache)
In case of problem, I redo a symlink on previous version
Basic programming language celebrates its 60th birthday
The first Basic interpreter went live in May 1964. This was intended to make it easier to learn programming. However, the computers to go with it were not available until much later.
Basic is the abbreviation for "Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code". In other words, it is a general-purpose programming language for beginners.