• 10 Posts
  • 51 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: December 28th, 2023

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  • Jokes aside, LLMs are actually pretty nice, since they lower the barrier to entry for programming. A guy I know has been doing all of his data processing with obscure Excel hacks his entire life. But recently he had to parse a file with like a million or so lines, which would take forever in excel, so now he’s hacking together a python script using ChatGPT and meta ai. And in the process, he’s actually picking up a bit of python knowledge himself. He now knows what lists are, how loops and if statements work, and he even understands “intermediate” features like list comprehension and regex. They said llms would replace programmers, but in reality they’re making more of us lol



  • Gradual typing isn’t reinventing the wheel, it’s a new paradigm. Statically typed code is easier to write and harder to debug. Dynamically typed code is harder to debug, but easier to write. With gradual typing, the idea is that you can first write dynamic code (easier to write), and then – wait for it – GRADUALLY turn it into static code by adding type hints (easier to debug). It separates the typing away from the writing, meaning that the programmer doesn’t have to multitask as much. If you know what you’re doing, mypy really does let you eat your cake and keep it too.







  • renzev@lemmy.worldOPtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldNever again
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    5 months ago

    LaTeX is great, but I prefer Markdown for software documentation (bonus points if your flavor of markdown supports LaTeX-style math). Standard LaTeX is geared towards typesetting and formatting, which is great for reports and journals, but not so much for software documentation, so you end up with a lot of boilerplate. Markdown syntax is also more accessible to beginners, I feel. And if you have a really big project that requires features like cross-references, there’s things like myst markdown.




  • renzev@lemmy.worldOPtoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlNever again
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    5 months ago

    D*scord is technically searchable and fairly archiveable (messages never get deleted due to old age (in my experience at least) or if the original poster deletes their account). And some d*scord servers even have a Q&A mode similar to st*ck *verflow. But yeah, not the right tool for the job, not to mention ABSOLUTELY PROPRIETARY




  • Typical conversation between a non-programmer and a programmer about AI:

    Won’t AI put you out of your job?

    It probably won’t

    Well, can’t AI write code much faster and more efficiently than humans?

    How would it know what code to write?

    I guess you would need to provide it with a description of the app that you want it to make?

    So you’re telling me that in the future, there will be machines that can generate computer code based entirely on a description of the required functionality?

    I guess so?

    Those machines are called “compilers”, and “a description of the required functionality” is called “a program”. You’re describing programming.