cgyalen
cgyalen.bsky.social
cgyalen
@cgyalen.bsky.social
ML Engineer @ Amplified Global
Python | Rust | Fatherhood
Agreed - ultimately it’s a wake up call to people with hard engineering skills that beautiful code alone isn’t enough to ship a product.

It would suck to get your lunch eaten by Devin or ChatGPT just because you couldn’t be disciplined enough to ship good code consistently and often.
January 19, 2025 at 8:33 PM
On the other hand LLMs get trained on source code for these kinds of libraries and repos to better themselves, but ultimately don’t actually contribute anything back.

Feels like a way to extract and exploit value from pre-existing FOSS than it is to actually create new value/ideas.
January 19, 2025 at 8:03 PM
Is the end-consumer value the only type of value that matters here?

I’m thinking about how many great pieces of tech have been created to power great products.

But with the current SotA LLMs, I don’t see them creating the kinds libraries and frameworks that deliver value to the wider dev community
January 19, 2025 at 7:59 PM
I know - it just seems like the kind of thing that collectively the community wants, but the language isn’t ready/built for.

IMO It’s hard to look at things like Mojo or Cython, or libs like Pydantic, or the various PEPs around improving the typing std lib without coming away with that conclusion.
January 19, 2025 at 3:46 AM
In the right hands I think every language can have concision, but I think whether or not conventions/idioms within a language *keep* that concision is another problem altogether.

But I agree with your point - static typing doesn’t need verbosity, and we have good examples to boot.
January 18, 2025 at 7:48 PM
Agreed, that would be the only way around it.

It’s a problem of taste. Concision offers no technical benefits (assuming machine code is identical), but some people prefer writing less code.

Others prefer no doubt about what any piece of their app is doing, even if it means writing more code.
January 18, 2025 at 5:12 PM
IMO - using Rust vs. Python as an example, that trade-off of concision vs. good typing is going to be a hard circle to square.

It’s not so much a technical problem as much as it is a social one. Strong typing necessitates more symbols/code. The more you type, the less concise you’re really being.
January 18, 2025 at 3:18 PM