[TZubiri]

>The AI bullish case has a historical analogy at its core: when high-level languages replaced assembly, [1] assembly programmers resisted.

This is a very common myth, there was never a period where everyone programmed in assembly and then high level languages were introduced.

Pretty much since the first CPUs were released, there were already programming languages for them.

Alan Turing went from hooking physical wires up, to writing Autocode for the Ferranti in less than a Decade.

And it's not even that the period of Assembly programming was brief, spanning almost a decade after WW2, the guys wrote in symbolic mathematical language before setting on to write the physical schematics of their machines.

So no, there wasn't a period where we all programmed in Assembly and then we discovered programming languages and we saw that it was good.

[porcoda]

The footnote on their sentence about assembly programmers: “I mean, I dunno. I'm not a historian. This is a vibes-level historical reconstruction. I would be curious if this is way off base though”

So, yeah. They just made it up because it felt right. (Which, I guess is what one would expect from AI related stuff these days.)

You’re definitely right though: it doesn’t take a deep dive into the history of computing and programming languages to find higher-than-assembly level languages emerging at the very dawn of computing.

[habitue]

Sometimes, in the interest of having something rather than nothing, I have to press publish. This entails getting things wrong, which is regrettable.

I will say, that I'm trying to steelman the code-as-assembly POV, and I dont think the exact historical analogy is critical to it being right or wrong. The main thing is that "we've seen the level of abstraction go up before, and people complained, but this is no different" is the crux. In that sense, a folk history is fine as long as the pattern is real