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smeej 4 hours ago

I wonder whether there's a relevant analogy between human languages and computer languages.

I've read hundreds of books. It may be thousands if you count the multiple series I devoured as a bookish child. I think my understanding of my mother tongue is probably in the top decile of native speakers.

But I haven't ever written a book. I'm not sure I would want to write a book, though I'm reasonably sure it wouldn't be the linguistic skills that would keep me from finishing one if I did.

Not having written any books doesn't keep me from knowing whether a book I'm reading was written well or poorly. I can tell that from my extensive experience reading a variety of books of different quality.

Maybe that's what's coming for computer languages. Maybe people who like reading, interacting with, and understanding computer languages will become highly skilled readers, with the ability to recognize well-written and poorly-written code. Perhaps they'll be the ones guiding the models to improve the code generation, or finding the structural changes that would improve the code for companies making truly important projects.

Or maybe we're just going to end up with incredible amounts of poorly written drivel that works well enough for some niche audience and makes a few bucks for the person who spins it up, and most software won't ever matter on any sort of large scale, just like most books aren't ever read. Maybe there will be some pockets that really care about writing very well and producing excellent things, and they'll hire the people who love bringing that about, and the rest of the people currently developing software will have fun little hobby projects that only their friends and family ever bother to use.

This doesn't seem that different from what has happened with written human language to me.