this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Programmer Humor

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 18 hours ago

Self-learned programming, started building stuff on my own, and then went through an actual computer science program.

Same. Starting with QBASIC, no less, which is an excellent source of terrible practices. At one point I created a code snippet that would perform a division and multiplication to find the remainder, because I'd never heard of modulo. Or functions.

Right now, this lets people skip the hair-pulling syntax errors, and tell the computer what they think the program should be doing, in plain English. It's not even "compileable pseudocode." It's high-level logic, nearly to the point that logic errors are all that can remain. It desperately needs some non-answer feedback states for if you tell it to "implement MP4 encoding" and expect that to Just Work.

But it's teaching people to write the comments first.

we’re nowhere close to that right now.

The distance from here to "oh shit" is shorter than we'd prefer. This tech works like a joke. "Chain of thought" apparently means telling the robot to act smarter... and it does. Which is almost less silly than Stable Diffusion removing every part of the marble that doesn't look like Hatsune Miku. If it's stupid, but it works... it's still stupid. But it works.

Someone's gonna prompt "Write like Donald Knuth" and the robot's gonna go, "Oh, you wanted good code? Why didn't you say so."