I highly respect the Ken Thompson and the rest of the old UNIX hands, but wouldn't they admit that the real world is messy and the best solutions in isolation don't always win?
Their creation C and UNIX won over the more advanced LISP and Smalltalk systems because they were simpler to implement. Even their own more advanced Plan 9 based OSs could not displace the more widespread unix-like systems.
It seems distribution and 'good enough' to rely on always wins. IMO, dynamic languages like Perl, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, PHP and the heavily marketed Java provided good enough high level facilities that have prevented people from reaching for Lisp and Smalltalk.
Looking at it through this lens, perhaps C++ was the vehicle for strapping some high level facilities on a widely adopted low level performant language that made it just good enough of a technology for wide adoption.
You think that LISP and Smalltalk aren't widely used is because they weren't easy to implement in the late 1980's? There have been many languages that have risen to prominence in the 40 years since, yet LISP and Smalltalk remain niche languages.
My opinion is that Lisp and Smalltalk are too pure and abstract. C is heavily tied to the real world of computing and can be easier to grasp for beginner. But try to explain variable bindings (instead of assignment) or message passing (instead of function calls) to a beginner in programming. It’s not that they’re hard to explain or understand, they’re just hard to be completely grasped without a foundation in computer science. They’re too alien.
Rust, Python, Java, Ruby, Scala, Swift to start with. These are languages with very wide adoption. Objective-C is very Smalltalk-like, but it is being phased out for Swift.
> Outsourcing the work deprives you of who you become by writing it.
Just because AI can do something that resembles work should not mean outsourcing work to it. Mathematicians should not outsource their work to AI just like programmers should not outsource programming to AI.
Humans working with AIs in a tight loop means intellectual work becomes more high-level and creative, but a human should always own the work, validate it and stake their reputation to it. Simply ban any humans who produce low quality work using AI.
I don't think that is possible. Humans have always taken the path of least resistance, especially when it comes to work/school.
The idea that we just "trust everyone to carefully check and learn from AI output" as our barrier to human skillsets eroding is never going to work.
There is an Anthropic engineering post on HM front page that addresses this exact issue:
"... supervise the agent’s behavior via a human-in-the-loop. Claude Code previously protected against agents taking unintended actions by asking users for permission at each turn. Theoretically that works, but we’ve found the approach to be fallible. Our telemetry showed users approved roughly 93% of permission prompts. The more approvals a user sees, the less attention they pay to each, becoming over time much less diligent in their supervision. "
Yeah I'm seeing this with the attitude towards AI. Especially as the economic benefits increase, we will justify increasingly reckless approaches. (Probably until some major catastrophe. That seems to be how these things go.)
While it is human nature to minimize energy expended on doing things, progress has always come from the minority who prioritize disciplined thinking and action.
While minimizing energy spent worked well in historic periods where survival was hard, in this era of abundance and a complex, interconnected and fragile civilization, the same instinct becomes harmful.
> Mathematicians should not outsource their work to AI just like programmers should not outsource programming to AI.
There is a huge difference between the two. Mathematicians work on discovering fundamental truths of the universe that go into the corpus of human knowledge forever. Programmers create utilities.
I know a PHD in math that claims math is invented by ourselves and not any universal true. So well, depends who you ask.
Also some of these programming utilities may outlive some math proof. Time will tell
Of course they are universal truths. We may have made up the rules/abstractions/symbols to represent the underlying but a proof will hold in any part of the universe. Infact, math will hold in any universe. You could change every fundamental physical property of the universe and those proofs will still hold.
Those are wild claims that you can't possibly prove. They are typically assumed to be the case to the extent that we even think about them but in the end are largely unanswerable philosophical questions.
It’s not a claim, it’s a pretty self apparent fact. To wrap your head around this, as the simplest example 2+2=4 doesn’t change anywhere or under any different physical law. It’s as universal as you can get. There’s nothing philosophical about this.
It is a claim, and you can't test it. If physical laws varied between galaxies you wouldn't know unless we were able to measure it. So the current bound on physical phenomena is whatever the resolution of our observational data is, coupled with our models that match it.
How are you going to get observational data for a different universe? Does such a thing even exist? What is its nature? You're operating well outside the bounds of human knowledge.
What you are actually saying there is that you can't imagine 2+2 being anything other than 4. That's perfectly reasonable but it's not the same thing.
There is no circumstance where 2+2 does not equal 4. It is a literal fact.
At the most fundamental level, you can only have a discreet or a non-discreet universe. If it’s discreet, there are countable things and 2+2 = 4 is true. In a non-discreet universe there are no countable things, but the universe itself is countable. If the universe were non-discreet and infinite, you could still count the infinities so it’s still true.
You are making a number of assumptions there seemingly without realizing it even after I explicitly called it out. I'm not sure what to say other than to suggest that there's an entire field, analytic philosophy, concerned with such matters.
You literally can't prove that you aren't a brain in a vat so I have no idea how you expect to make sweeping claims about the fundamental nature of reality. It is certainly convenient and practical to take certain basic assumptions as fact in order to go about higher level tasks but that does not make them so.
Sure, technically you are correct, i cant prove that im not a schizophrenic hallucinating everything including 2+2=4 and including this discussion. But starting from a reasonable point of beliefs that we accept it is fair to say 2+2=4 will just hold universally when counting discrete things.
Even if you were a brain in a vat this would be true. Even if the simulation disallowed the number four or groups of four it would still be true. How are you not getting this? What does philosophy have to do with anything. Pretty much everything in this universe is debatable and can be questioned, except this. Anyways I’m dropping out of this. You don’t come back with anything except a sense of wonder and a wide eyed gaze.
Noticeably you still have yet to defend any of these wild claims you're making. You've now resorted to personal attacks rather than engage with what I wrote.
If you are so certain of your claim then why are you seemingly incapable of defending it using logic and reason?
> What does philosophy have to do with anything.
If you took the time to look up the field of analytic philosophy to see what it's about, particularly with regards to metaphysics, that would presumably answer your question. There are literally treatise on the underlying nature of numbers and mathematical concepts (among other things) and you will find that there are multiple competing views on the matter.
When someone says "hey it seems like you're unaware of thing" and you think "WTF even is that" it is at that point generally a good idea to think to yourself "hey maybe there's something important that I don't know here" and then at least perform a topical check of the thing.
Perhaps, the issue is that the pace at which they release open models compared to their closed ones, shows that they are more committed on the closed ones and are not interested in advancing the state of the art of open models.
I can't say what they should or should not be doing.
Generally, it is conspicuous how American companies are absent when it comes to state of the art open models. Meta tried for some time but it seems they've given up.
It would depend on the complexity of the challenge. Knowing that a knowledgeable human took the time to verify the project/exercise gives a learner confidence that they are in the right track, not going down a path of hallucinations
You'd think all these executives making investments into Agentic coding would throw money at something like Codecrafters so that their engineers ramp up their design and architecture skills.
Their creation C and UNIX won over the more advanced LISP and Smalltalk systems because they were simpler to implement. Even their own more advanced Plan 9 based OSs could not displace the more widespread unix-like systems.
It seems distribution and 'good enough' to rely on always wins. IMO, dynamic languages like Perl, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, PHP and the heavily marketed Java provided good enough high level facilities that have prevented people from reaching for Lisp and Smalltalk.
Looking at it through this lens, perhaps C++ was the vehicle for strapping some high level facilities on a widely adopted low level performant language that made it just good enough of a technology for wide adoption.
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