I think people are coping. Software engineering has only gotten easier over time. Fifteen years ago, knowing how to code made you seem like a wizard, and learning was tough - you had to read books, truly understand them, and apply what you learned. Then came the web and YouTube, which simplified things a lot. Now with LLMs, people with zero experience can build applications. Even I find myself mostly prompting when working on projects.

Carmack’s tweet feels out of touch. He says we should focus only on business value, not engineering. But what made software engineering great was that nerds could dive deep into technical challenges while delivering business value. That balance is eroding - now, only the business side seems to matter.

I have to agree with author. I don't see what people like about golang. It seems like people use it because it is cool but after a while people realize they are less productive with it.

Go is not cool, it's boring and readable. I don't need a diagram to understand what the code is doing compared to Java. I say that with deep respect for the JVM and all the problems that are solved with it. It's an incredible ecosystem.

I'm productive in Go because I realise most of my time isn't spent typing, it's thinking. I shy away from over abstraction and lean heavily towards composition.

If you're solving a problem that requires complicated type system - don't use Go. If you're writing a UI - don't use Go. If you like 20 layers of abstraction - don't use Go.

If you're writing a product like I am, with similar constraints, then Go is an excellent fit.

People for some reason like to pretend everyone is working on the same problem that they are, and have the same requirements they do.

This person doesn't like Go, and that's fine. I have no doubt I'd be able to solve their problem in Go, and I have no doubt they'd be able to solve my problem in Java.

Thats fair! I just don't agree with the readable part and thinking. I personally get tired having to look at all the archaic boilerplate to find the actual logic that I want to reason about.

Java code has a lot of boilerplate too, consider a "hello world" program, then consider a program split into multiple files in a single directory

I think both Java and go are too verbose and noisy on the eyes.

I won't disagree with that. At the same time, I loathe code where I cannot comprehend what's going on unless I'm an expert in the syntax and esoteric language features. I spend more time looking at other people's code than my own.

Go's advantage here is that everyone's code has a much higher similarity score than other languages, both in syntax and semantics

Go was written primarily for software engineering over implementing programming language research ideas. It's more than the language, it's also the tooling, automation, and simplicity around it.

Having a standard formatter certainly helps. But not having rich modern features built-in means more custom/non-standard code, not less, that you have to read.

I haven’t used go in a few years so not familiar with how it’s improved. But not having basic container functions like ‘map’ was absolutely bonkers.

> having rich modern features

Also means having to understand a lot more syntax to understand what's going on

I would not lump map/reduce into this category since they are trivial to implement with a function and a loop

Go code just keep working with minimal maintenance. The last major maintenance that was required was the addition of go.mod, and for the most part of your project was using one of the community modules systems is was a completely automated maintenance.

Go has the least maintenance of any language I’ve used(or had to maintain), save some C/Cpp projects that target libraries with essential frozen APIs.

That doesn’t mean you don’t get to keep things up to date; go wants you to run the oldest possibly written go code with the newest go compiler tool chain w/ no effort. Just upgrade go and run your 10yo code probably without any changes needed.

Cloudflare have always had this. I wonder how this will affect them.

It is a total clusterfuck how you even get access to the API. So people pay because they want a convenient way to get access to GPT-4.

Did they change it recently? When I got it 2 years ago you pretty much just opened an account and put in a credit card. Or you mean specifically to GTP-4? If so I think they made it generally available for everyone now https://openai.com/blog/gpt-4-api-general-availability

I am still perplexed that people accept the UX of Discord. It is just so horrible that I can not get myself to use it even if I am looking for a place to engage with communities. There are way too many channels which you cannot opt out of.

Welcome to the future! There is no way stopping that now.

That is your workflow. Many places have replaced email with Slack. For DMs people might not care how good the message is but for public channels where there are many recipients I am sure people care about the quality of their message. The fact that it might be more beneficial in an email client I don't think is relevant for Slack as a company.

That has always been the case. That is why I also believe coding will be forever changed with these models. We won't be copy/pasting into a chat-interface but this will be integrated everywhere making it a completely different way of working.

I think it is overblown. ChatGPT was released about a few months ago and google have already created their own alternative albeit a worse version. I would say that is pretty good for an enterprise organisation to react that fast.

Right. Reaching 100 million users within 3 months of launching is definitely overblown.

Perhaps I was not clear. I meant google loosing ground in AI is overblown not ChatGPT itself.

Usually a problem can be split into many parts. Are you not able to get ChatGPT to solve some of them individually without understanding your work domain?