[jakderrida]

>The code ChatGPT generates is often bad in ways that are hard to detect. If you are not an experienced software engineer, the defects could be impossible to detect

I keep hearing this, but it's incorrect. While I only know R, which is obviously a simple language, I would never type out all my code and go without testing to ensure it does what I intended before using it regularly.

So I can't imagine someone that knows a more complex language just typing out all of it before integrating it into business systems at their work or anything else before testing it.

Why would AI be any different?

Why the hell are AI skeptics acting like getting help from an LLM would involve not testing anything? Of course I test it! Why on earth wouldn't I? Just as I tested code made by freelancers I hired on commission before using the code I bought from them. Do AI skeptics really not test their own code? Are you all insane?

[disgruntledphd2]

> While I only know R, which is obviously a simple language

Take it from someone who started with R, R is 100% not a simple language. If you can write good R, you're probably a surprisingly good potential SE as R is kinda insane and inconsistent due to 50+ years of history (from S, to R etc).

[jakderrida]

Hmmm.. I'm trying to imagine interviewing for SE and telling them I got wealthy from a crypto market-making algorithm I coded in R during Covid and the interviewer responding with anything but laughter or with silence as they ponder legal ways to question my mental health.

It's an excellent language, I think, for many reasons. One is that you can work with data within hours because even before learning what packages or classes are, you got native objects for data storage, wrangling, and analysis. Even import my Excel data and rapidly learn the native function cheat sheet so fast that I was excited to learn what packages are because I couldn't wait to see what I could do.

That was my experience in like 2010, maybe, and after having C++ and Python go in and out my head during college multiple times. I view R as simple only because I actually felt more helpless to keep learning it than helpless to ever learn coding at all. Worth noting that I was a Stat/Probability tutor with a Finance degree and much Excel experience.

[disgruntledphd2]

> That was my experience in like 2010, maybe, and after having C++ and Python go in and out my head during college multiple times. I view R as simple only because I actually felt more helpless to keep learning it than helpless to ever learn coding at all. Worth noting that I was a Stat/Probability tutor with a Finance degree and much Excel experience.

Ah yeah, makes sense. That's the happy path for learning R (know enough stats etc to decode the help pages).

That being said, R is an interesting language with lots of similarities to both C based languages and also Lisp (R was originally a scheme intepreter), so it's surprisingly good at lots of things (except string manipulation, it's terrible at that).