[GolDDranks]

I disagree. I think that after 1992, we got memory safe languages that brought a meaningful improvement to the status quo. And after 2015, we've got low-level memory safe languages (Rust, as the major example. There are others, more experimental.)

The average programmer doesn't get better – if anything, we might be getting worse, because the tools allow us to, and the capitalist reality doesn't optimize for great programs or programmers but for more money.

But, at least, the tools are way better than in 1992, and I think we, as a collective profession, have learned a thing or two.

[miyoji]

I agree that there has been progress, but if you look at really mature fields and look at the transformations they've been through and the level of understanding that the highest level practitioners have, and compare it to computer programming... I think we were at maybe 2-3% in 1992 and we're maybe up to 7-9% now?

We're still in the alchemy stages. Real masters can do nuclear chemistry.

Another way to look at it: there have been a lot of arguments on this website about whether or not LLMs are conscious. I think they obviously aren't, but I don't think there's anything special about human brains vs computer chips that means that conscious computers is impossible.

I think a "very good" computer programmer should be able to program consciousness. Not program something like an LLM that trains itself into consciousness, the actual process itself.

We are nowhere close.

[anthk]

We had memory safe languages before 1992.

[GolDDranks]

Indeed, I realized I had my timeline a bit off after posting that. Of course, we have Lisp ca. 1960. (Pascal appeared 1970, but I don't think that's widely considered memory-safe. ML 1973, and that never got a widespread industry use.)

What I mean is: we had memory safe system-implementation languages in wide spread production use only after/around the times of the publication of that memo; importantly, Java.

We had memory-safe experimental programming languages, and scripting languages before that. And of course, around those times, hardware was fast enough that you could start implementing systems with scripting languages (Perl, Python, Ruby, JavaScript)

And the bit I want to correct is, of course, the point is if they are actually used. In that sense, I'd correct the introduction of Rust around 2023-2026 in actual, wide-spread use.