[jhbadger]

While I think there has been a lot of hype in generative AI and expecting it to replace programming as we know it is premature at least, programming has always become "less challenging" over time due to improvements in technology. The famous "Story of Mel" was about a programmer in the late 1950s refusing to use those newfangled optimized assemblers rather than writing machine code directly. Then there were compiled languages like Fortran and Cobol that were far easier than machine code/assembly. Then higher level languages, etc.

[fuzztester]

>The famous "Story of Mel" was about a programmer in the late 1950s refusing to use those newfangled optimized assemblers rather than writing machine code directly.

IIRC, K&R said something similar in the first edition of their C book (referring to others' imagined reactions about the C strcmp function:

"What, you mean I have to call a function to compare two strings?"

They went on to add that they had tried to make C function call overhead quite low, to handle this issue.

[fuzztester]

Same with (after HLLs, and in rough historical order, over a few decades), 4GLs, CASE tools, OOP / OOAD / UML / round-trip engineering, NoSQL, Functional Programming, what, not, ML, AI, ... ;)

What is that French quote about: the more things change, the more they stay the same?

Or that George Santayana quote.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santayana

[dctoedt]

> Or that George Santayana quote.

Which one?

[fuzztester]

Good question, actually. Thanks for asking.

I initially kind of assumed that most people would know about it, because it is a somewhat famous one, or at least, I've read it in many places. But your question made me realise that may not be the case. So, here it is, from the top of the above Wikipedia article about him, just below the header:

[ Santayana is popularly known for aphorisms, such as "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" ] .

[dctoedt]

Yeah, I wondered whether that might be the one. But it's slightly different from the plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose quote, so I thought maybe you had a different one in mind. (Santayana was known for his aphorisms.)

[fuzztester]

Yes, they are two different quotes. I didn't mean to use them as equivalent. It was more like, I used both, because both were applicable in the context I used them in.