Post #3518284

@seachaint@masto.hackers.town @rootwyrm@weird.autos @jackwilliambell@rustedneuron.com @cstross@wandering.shop Perl was never a write-only language but lots of write-only developers were using Perl in its day. Now lots of the new breed of write-only developers use JavaScript and it shows. Neither Perl nor JavaScript are "beautiful" languages out of the gate, but both are powerful enough that with discipline they allow for well-structured, maintainable code. One core tenant of the "less is more" argument is that you should understand all of the code you write and hence it must be small enough that this is possible. AI defeats that goal unless you use AI only to teach you about programming. In my experience this is ultimately more work than learning directly from the manuals. With old languages (C, Perl, JavaScript, ...) it was hard to be disciplined enough to write maintainable code. Newer languages (Go, Rust, Swift, ...) were developed to help with that (and they do!) but it is depressing to see that so many projects are writing sloppy code while pretending that the new languages automagically lead to "good" software. (btw. I went through my education at ETH but am just too young to have been to lectures by Niklaus Wirth himself. However, his influence still showed through his disciples and the curriculum.)