This is the argument Grace Hopper made in the 1950s when she was pushing for high-level languages.

Her colleagues insisted that compilers could never match hand-written assembly.

She argued that programmer productivity mattered more, that humans working in a language closer to their thinking would write better programs faster, and the net result would be better software. Seventy years later, the same pattern keeps playing out.

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apitman 35 minutes ago | parent [-]

I don't think the better software part is playing out

	▲	remexre 6 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		you're thinking of the programs in low-level langs that survived their higher-level-lang competitors; if you plot the programs on your machine by age, how does the low quartile compare on reliability between programs written in each group
	▲	ch4s3 8 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		There’s a lot of really great software out there right now, and a lot that’s terrible and I think powerful abstractions enable both.