The Hottest Programming Language of 2023 Kinda Sucks
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Sometimes I find that I’m writing to an intended audience so small that I need a Venn-microscope to see the vannishing intersection (case in point: the misspelling of “vanishing” is intended to be a Venn-related joke). I’ve been told that writing so that three people in the world enjoy all your references is an exercise in futility. That is why, in this article, I’ve traveled to the opposite extreme of the spherical-writing-manifold to commit the antipodal sin: I will attempt to address everyone.
Rewind
Let’s begin with a story: this time last year, I was programming.
I was sit/standing at this very sit/stand desk, working on extremely complicated programmetry (trust me, it was complicated). I was moving at what I would like to believe was a pretty fast clip and writing what I would like to believe was “decent code”.
Sometimes I would start writing something familiar before I even started thinking about it. The pianist that sits down and their fingers rest in a familiar place before the mind is ready: muscle memory.
Sometimes I would use “methodologies” like TDD or BSM. According to David Deutsch (and because this doesn’t to my knowledge break the laws of physics), someone in the Multiverse worshiped me as God’s gift to programming.
Sometimes I would try out new technologies, like an octopus themed AI co-programming service named “Copilot”. I’ve discussed this technology before, so I’m not going to dive into Copilot, but suffice it to say I found it intriguing.
This year
Fast forward to this year: one year after David Deutsch himself, in yet another parallel Universe, attempted to overthrow the government and install me as Supreme Chancellor — well this year has been weird. While I can’t tell you exactly what I’ve worked on, what I can say is that my entire profession has taken an odd turn.
This year I probably let AI write about 50% of my code (maybe more — I’ve done a lot of React this year for some reason). Again, this article is not about Copilot, so I…
