noufalibrahim

Very interesting. I was very active on Freenode#Emacs. The Emacswiki and all of those resources. I jumped onto and heavily got into org when I first came across it in the early 2010s I think.

But you're right, it looks like Emacs went on strongly but I fell off the bandwagon.

The so called editor wars seem to be over and emacs has lost. I've been involved with it since the early 2000s and it's still my primary editor. I feel that the users have reduced into a smaller but more dedicated/passionate group which is probably for the best.

It was easy to get a job. Several of us got multiple but then the bubble burst and about 70% of the job offers were rescinded. Some companies were generous enough to offer a one time payment as compensation but many just vanished.

I don't know if you're being sarcastic in your comment but it was not a pleasant time.

I don't have a clear answer myself. But there are multiple dimensions to this.

First is from an employment, livelihood perspective. I don't know the "right" answer but like with most things, it's easy to see the wrong ones - Bury your head in the sand and declare that this is just a passing phase, insist on going deeper into curmudgeon territory waxing nostalgic about the "Golden Era" of programming that's over etc. The opposites (trying out the new tools that are being released, reading up on things happening and developing a mental model of how things are moving etc.) seem to be sensible things to do.

Second, from a personal perspective. Here too, inversion is useful. Stopping to think is a bad idea. Like all our faculties, you lose what you don't use. So, actively learning things that are hard (a new "natural" language, a new phsyical skill that you wanted to) will help keep you sharp. Recreational programming is fine I guess and you can use AI to give you that you extra push when you're mired in an area that you don't care for and which you know how to do but are avoiding because of the tedium.

When the demand for work comes, it's quite clear to me that someone who's done what they can and has a some insight on what's going on has an advantage over the person who hasn't. Whether that translates into economical opportunities is beyond us to say but it's beyond our control as well so there's no point in worrying about it.

Of course. This has been proven again and again on the economic level. People have to let go of old skills and learn new ones to survive.

For AI though, there is a mental angle which is being discussed now (brain gyms etc.) which was an early concern of mine. When we make something, there is an tangible value created for the buyer/consumer but there is also a more subtle positive effect the on the builder/maker. e.g. even if it's it's cheaper, faster, (and in an imaginary worlds), more healthy to buy packaged food, sitting down and making it subtly changes the chef who makes the food. Sort of the motivation for a grandmother baking a cake for her grandkids.

I've been able to realise many of my abandoned projects due to AI. I can spin up a few agents and have them build things completely without intervention more or less. Many of these are programs I use daily. This is definitely huge. However, I remember the kick of struggling with problems during projects which was where most, if not all, the learning happened. All that experience is what makes me able to command and control these agents properly. It had an effect on me beyond the outcome (most of the projects are dead/abandoned anyway). Another example - I remember an old company called "Bond" which had a robot to create stationery using a calligraphic hand. Contrast that to the almost spiritual effect doing calligraphy has on a master penman. Using automation to create fine calligraphy gets you the former but the individual and society loses the latter. It's not immediately clear to me what the end result will be but I do feel that a lot is being lost.

This is the problem.

Oh yes. The number of hours burnt away by this...

What a glorious combination of interesting, quick and absolutely useless. It's beautiful.

I completely agree. Back in the early 2000s, I was graduating out of college and desperately wanted a job to pay off some financial obligations. I wasn't the top scorer in class and didn't even make the cut off for the good jobs. However, I was pretty confident in my skills almost to the point of arrogance and showed that unapologetically to the lady from HR in charge of hiring. She gave me a chance and I got the job (which I later found really boring but that's a different story).

It was a mix of opportunity, the willingness to seize it, how well you talked and finally, in a large amount, luck.

Can you draw such a clear line? I put out some thing to experiment with an idea and then iterate over it till i get a solution and then spend time trying to polish that for production use. Thinking and coding are very rarely two separate states for me.

We used to give presentations about the average life of pages on the internet before it 404ed. It was cited from a SciAm article which was offline at the time and the only way to get the stat was via. the mirror on the Wayback Machine.

I'm in the middle. I've been using Python since the early 2.x series.

The good parts are that the inbuilt data structures and their apis are efficient and clean enough to write code that's mostly readable. Most of the heavy lifting is done in hand tuned C and performance intensive external modules are also written in C. There are several good projects that are written using it and while it's not theoretically perfect, it's useful enough. Like Stroustrup said - there are 2 kinds of the languages, ones that everyone complains about and ones that no one uses.

The bad parts are that it's very easy to use. Almost in a Visual Basic "producing crap just takes a squeeze" kind of way. It opened up programming to a lot of people (the genesis of Python was in the CP4E project - where this was the aim). This resulted in a lot of bad patterns, inefficient code, badly written but popular libraries. Also, the indentation idiom and other restrictions resulted in a lot of convoluted APIs.There's also a lot of baggage from the pre multi-core CPU era (threading etc.).

I still think of it as a great glue language. If there are libraries that are fast and can run well, a good FFI or wrapper which Python can leverage will amplify the reach and usability of the library.

On the overall, a language that's older than the venerable Java which people are still using (and hence complaining about) speaks to its longevity. So, atleast by that definition, it is successful.

It's very nicely done. I snapped the seatbelt on and that dread of a long boring flight automatically hit me. :)