[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