"If the problem is that we’ve painted our development environments into a corner that requires tons of boilerplate, then that is the problem. We should have been chopping the cruft away and replacing it with deterministic abstractions like we’ve always done. That’s what that Larry Wall quote about good programmers being lazy was about. It did not mean that we would be okay with pulling a damn slot machine lever a couple times to generate the boilerplate."
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@tante related an interesting thread & blog post about the benefits if boilerplate and how to mitigate the downsides (without LLMs): https://bsky.app/profile/tef.bsky.social/post/3meuby5k6bc24
@tante You're not wrong, just that enough people are hell-bent on finding out why write-once, never maintain, code is not a good idea.
@HeptaSean big fan of low code/no code environments for allowing people to solve their problems without a cs degree. It's still fascinating how hart it is do get those to actually be adopted.
@tante @HeptaSean For environments where buggy code and security aren't a factor, and the user is the one creating it, who knows what they want it to do, sure. But if you're selling it to people, or it's going to be migrated to some other environment? Not so much.
I would much rather have custom coding shops where people can buy the doodads they want coded and have some professional ethics involved.
@robotistry @tante Depends on how the “no code” environment looks like *exactly*. If it actually works on precise business workflows and formulas, why would you need to check the deterministically generated code? You don't check the assembly or byte code coming out of a compiler, either. It's just one further abstraction layer, again a step further, maybe the deciding step, to the end users.
@HeptaSean @robotistry yeah. I am more thinking about things like IFTTT or n8n or something where you can quickly wire together feature blocks that reliably provide certain features.
@tante Maybe, it's a spectrum? The components that are wired together (and configured) are then ideally provided by software shops with professional ethics as @robotistry sketched them.
Also, “just wiring together components” has been promised quite a few times in the past decades. Probably pays out to have a short look at where those promises – from CORBA to Web Components – failed or at least didn't provide /this/.
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