Programming

Attention, Spoiled Software Engineers: Take a Lesson from Google’s Programming Language

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Attention, Spoiled Software Engineers: Take a Lesson from Google’s Programming Language

Many of today’s programmers—excuse me, software engineers—consider themselves “creatives.” Artists of a sort. They are given to ostentatious personal websites with cleverly hidden Easter eggs and parallax scrolling; they confer upon themselves multihyphenate job titles (“ex-Amazon-engineer-investor-author”) and crowd their laptops with identity-signaling vinyl stickers. Some regard themselves as literary sophisticates. Consider the references smashed into … Read more

Back to BASIC—the Most Consequential Programming Language in the History of Computing

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Back to BASIC—the Most Consequential Programming Language in the History of Computing

For someone just getting into this weird craft, BASIC felt positively thaumaturgic. It was spellcasting: You uttered words that brought iron and silicon to life, and made them do things. (As the software engineer Erin Spiceland puts it, coding is “telling rocks what to think.”) If you were, as I was, marinated in Tolkien and … Read more

The AI-Powered Future of Coding Is Near

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The AI-Powered Future of Coding Is Near

I am by no means a skilled coder, but thanks to a free program called SWE-agent, I was just able to debug and fix a gnarly problem involving a misnamed file within different code repositories on the software-hosting site GitHub. I pointed SWE-agent at an issue on GitHub and watched as it went through the … Read more

The Eternal Truth of Markdown

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The Eternal Truth of Markdown

Markdown became a core part of how I wrote. The simplicity and flexibility meant I would live the dream of write once, run anywhere. It did lead to some ambiguity, though. Gruber would probably say this is by design. His emphasis throughout the Markdown documentation is on the syntax of Markdown, not—say—the resulting HTML. His … Read more

We’re Still Waiting for the Next Big Leap in AI

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We’re Still Waiting for the Next Big Leap in AI

When OpenAI announced GPT-4, its latest large language model, last March, it sent shockwaves through the tech world. It was clearly more capable than anything seen before at chatting, coding, and solving all sorts of thorny problems—including school homework. Anthropic, a rival to OpenAI, announced today that it has made its own AI advance that … Read more

Generative AI Is Totally Shameless. I Want to Be It

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Generative AI Is Totally Shameless. I Want to Be It

AI has a lot of problems. It helps itself to the work of others, regurgitating what it absorbs in a game of multidimensional Mad Libs and omitting all attribution, resulting in widespread outrage and litigation. When it draws pictures, it makes the CEOs white, puts people in awkward ethnic outfits, and has a tendency to … Read more

Inside the Cult of the Haskell Programmer

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Inside the Cult of the Haskell Programmer

At the same time, I understood almost immediately why Haskell was—and still is—considered a language more admired than used. Even one of its most basic concepts, that of the “monad,” has spawned a cottage industry of explainers, analogies, and videos. A notoriously unhelpful explanation, famous enough to be autocompleted by Google, goes: “A monad is … Read more

Stack Overflow Users Are Revolting Against an OpenAI Deal

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Stack Overflow Users Are Revolting Against an OpenAI Deal

On Monday, Stack Overflow and OpenAI announced a new API partnership that will integrate Stack Overflow’s technical content with OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI assistant. The deal has sparked controversy among Stack Overflow’s user community, with many expressing anger and protest over the use of their contributed content to support and train AI models. “I hate this. … Read more

How the U.S. government is regulating AI

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How the U.S. government is regulating AI

The U.S. government is considering laws to help society adapt to the introduction of artificial intelligence. Early users of the technology are already seeing labor productivity gains. For example, Klarna, a buy now, pay later financial services provider, estimates that its AI assistant tool will increase its profit outcome by $40 million by the end … Read more

How I Became a Python Programmer—and Fell Out of Love With the Machine

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How I Became a Python Programmer—and Fell Out of Love With the Machine

The difficulty with any new programming language is the sharp learning curve, all that drudgery and bashing your forehead into the keyboard. There was no Codecademy or Stack Overflow in those days. We bought books from the likes of O’Reilly and No Starch Press. I bought Learning Python and skimmed the first few chapters, but … Read more