henry_bone

It's simple enough: If you don't use it, you lose it.

The more you have, the more there is to lose and the longer it may take. But skills and knowledge fade, just as easily as fitness, or a tan.

It's an insidious rule too. Insidious in the sense that you may not realise you're not exercising a skill. You may think that your just doing it slightly differently, but you will adapt. In whatever way you made your life easier, that's where you'll pay, in strength, fluency, depth, whatever.

From that link:-

"With that said, permacomputing is an anti-capitalist political project. It is driven by several strands of anarchism, decoloniality, intersectional feminism, post-marxism, degrowth, ecologism."

They are post-modernist, collectivist, marxist. I couldn't get behind that.

That ideology is arguably the most destructive in human history.

With the use of quotes there, you've put those words in my mouth. I didn't say that.

What I am trying to express with the statement you refer to is that zig appeals to me on an aesthetic level. It suits my tastes.

I mentioned liberty because I appreciate that zig allows me to have complete control of memory allocations, and gives me quite a deal of control over the metal. I like this and I like that I don't have to appease a borrow checker. Zig's compiler and type system is strict enough to guide me to correctness, but the experience, broadly, is not so onerous that programming becomes tedious and frustrating.

These qualities, I suspect, resonate with my individualistic tendencies.

I'll bite. The first language I could "just write" in was C. I had internalised the language and its standard lib and didn't need the internet to work with it.

Rust is pushed by many as the replacement to C, because of the memory safety guarantees. I'm sympathetic. I worked with Haskell for a time, so I get it. But Rust seems quite complex. There are so many language features that there's memes about it. There's also the friction and learning curve.

So, for fun, I choose zig because, like C, I can hold most of the language in my head and "just write." I choose zig because it does a great deal to help me write correct and highly performant code. I can use arena allocators and defer and cure my code of many memory issues. Then there's the various language rules around pointers (optionals, slices, etc) that help me write correct code. There's the built in testing and the test allocator. I love that comptime and the build system are not special cases, but rather are just garden variety zig. I love the simplicity and elegance of it all.

I also choose zig because I prefer the liberty it affords me. I am responsible for each and every allocation. It appeals to my libertarian sensiblities.

Yeah, nah. Not so sure about that. I love zig, and I appreciate the rigour, care and thought that goes into the language and it's libs. What Andrew Kelley and the team are doing is excellent work, creating a useful, simple language with which to write efficient, correct programs.

His politics don't matter to me. Hell, if the politics of technologists dictated whether I used their products, I'd have to go live in the wilds, without any tech. :-)

Yeah, I'm aware. MitchellH posts about it quite a bit, most recently about AI "psychosis". Also, much of ghostty was created without the use of AI, I think. More recently, they've been using it to find bugs, improve performance, and generally refine and enhance ghostty and libghostty.

The LLM is the finishing tool, not the architect or core developer.

Yeah, there was a good article on here the other day where the author suggested going slower with AI and using it to help produce higher quality output. I think the idea is to be quite "hands on", coding much in the old way, but to use AI to help with, for example, test coverage, error mode detection and handling, refinement of the solution/feature, etc.

At least that's how I read it. :-) I'm learning that there's a place for the LLM but it's the sandpaper, not the chisel.

Yeah, maybe it's rose coloured glasses on my behalf. Those examples you mentioned, I would 100% agree with. It's some of the best software out there. And yeah, there's probably always been rubbish about.

I guess I hope that the good stuff keeps coming and the dross falls away. More signal, less noise.

"I’m a huge fan of the author Jack Vance;"

I've enjoyed his work too. Particularly the "Dying Earth" stories. I also read "Planet of Adventure".

My goodness did that man have an enormous vocab. I needed a dictionary with me to read his work. Great stories though.

That sounds expensive.

Hmm, Thanks HAL. :-)

Nice. HAL, from "A Space Odyssey", right?

From this, can we infer you're not exactly "all in" on coding via LLM Walter?

I, for one, am not. I've gone on the record with my thoughts in prior LLM related comment threads. They will make us dumb.

Let me add to the chorus of admiration for this piece of writing. Poignant, accurate, appropriately cynical.

On the other hand, I have quite the visceral reaction to the name because of the influence Hegel had on Marx, and subsequent 20th century critical theorists.