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by rpigab 1058 days ago
If you describe the woodcutting workflow as "go to forest - cut tree - put on carrier - repeat - ship", you could argue that woodcutting never really changed, but you now have forestry harvesters that cut a tree and remove all branches in less than 10 seconds, so it still changes some things like cost, scale and number of humans needed.

In programming, if you have a modern IDE like the Jetbrains ones, you have all local source code indexed for auto imports, autocomplete and enhanced code search, no braces errors at compile time because the closing one is added automatically and if you still manage to put it wrong, there's an instant notification about it and a one-click smart autofix, also there's full local history if you mess up, without even taking the time to make small commits, then there's CI/CD pipelines depending on what you're building, you can also use Sonar in IDE and in CI, also Sourcegraph, and even if some of this was already possible with good ol' grep, it was not the same IMO.

Then there's Copilot and ChatGPT, for many uses including prototyping stuff you don't even want to take the time to RTFM.

But yeah, I can recognize that the workflow looks the same, because it's the same job, we still use keyboards and monitors, and we edit files on drives hoping that it produces some expected result, and get disappointed in our lives when it doesn't.

And lots of us are still using the basic UNIX tools in their GNU versions like grep, awk, sed, vi/vim, etc., aged 30 (vim, ssh) to 50 years (grep, sed).

1 comments

> And lots of us are still using the basic UNIX tools in their GNU versions like grep, awk, sed, vi/vim, etc., aged 30 (vim, ssh) to 50 years (grep, sed).

Including myself. That's sort of my point. It's always fun reminding the Junior Engineers that, unlike whatever flavor of the month library the blogosphere calls The Next Big Thing, the majority of the stuff that comes preinstalled into their multiarch container image is older than they are.

I'm not a dinosaur, I'm a native.