Love this analogy. I think most of the arguments above seek to establish that the soft, as your analogy goes, is not the main or the only participant in the whole.
I am somewhat inclined to believe that this statement is aimed entirely at commercial sphere, which, at least in my mind, supports those arguing that this is a marketing ploy by the organizers of this campaign to make sure that their market share is protected. I think so for two reasons:
- a nefarious (or not so nefarious) state actor is not going to be affected by imposition of licensing or export controls. It seems to me rather naive to suppose that every state capable of doing so has not already scooped up all open source models and maybe nicked a few proprietary ones; and
- introduction of licensing or regulatory control will directly affect the small players (say, I wanted to build an AI in my basement) who would not be able to afford the cost of compliance.
I work for a smallish supermarket chain (I assume, by the US standards) - we have about a 1000 stores in 5 countries, about 40-45K tills. At peak trading my teams' services handle a combined 250K tps. We run a bunch of distributed systems in the cloud, across two DCs and some other weird legacy locations (there are even a few mainframes) - the business is really old and went digital before some of my colleagues were born :) (Anyone remember teletext? Yep, we were on that too).
So, Elixir/Erlang combo seems like a perfect fit. Instead, we are having all remaining Elixir and Erlang systems ripped out and re-written in Java.
The reason is simple - readability and hire-ability. The cherries on the cake - Java's "good enough" for what we do, the tooling, the quality and availability of reference resources and subject matter experts - are just that, cherries. But the ability to hire and onboard new engineers is THE thing - it took us 3 years to fully hire out the headcount we were allocated for just our little team and that is in Java. Hiring for Elixir and Erlang has been such a pain that we are having to pay contractors while we re-write the current Elixir and Erlang systems into Java. Our domain is somewhat complicated - most people who have not worked in food retail generally would not imagine it to be so - so onboarding people to the domain knowledge takes 3-6 months and that is without "This is what? Erlang?" barrier. That is where readability of Java and non-FP vs Elixir/Erlang and FP comes in as well.
I guess what I am trying to say is that, yes, the right tool for the job and all that but good enough tool with a significantly higher hiring pool is proving so much better.
It would be interesting to see where things are at in a few years. I get the problem. But not sure the right decision was made. I've seen the "leave esoteric/boutique/niche language for more commodity platforms" play out a number of times over the years. The results are very mixed, and hard to infer because of the many variables. But I don't usually see the "we're so much better now" after the original zeal for the exodus pans out. Usually it ends up being more of a "you had a problem so you did X. Now you have two problems" in my experience. I wish you and yours the best of luck.
As a lawyer with 13 years experience in my previous life, I can tell you that you can't trust a paralegal either. What it does do is give you the "first pass" - if I could automate the first pass over 100,000 pages and the AI highlights say 100 examples of the content I am looking for, of which say 10 are good quality examples of what I am looking for, then we are off to a very good start.
This, more than anything and it doesn't only apply to the "new" languages. I spent the last year picking up basic Common Lisp and Elixir just for the fun of it. As "languages" they are great, but their ecosystems made me realize how spoiled I am working in Java.
I sort of think you just proved the author's point - you are using the AI to increase your productivity. People who cannot adjust in that way will be less productive and loose out.
The problem with this argument is that completely ignores the die-off rate of the population or the demographics. On average, our population is dieing off at about 600k per year - 500k immigrants does not even break even. We have a negative birth rate. We need new blood - ONS projection for population growth between 2020 and 2045 is under 6%. To compare - mid-1995 and mid-2020 it was just over 15%. We are old-age-heavy which is really bad for the economy and taxation. The mindset should align with data.
It's a new city every year of only small boat arrivals. As others have pointed out the the wider picture is even more absurd. Largely of people not fleeing war or real conflict or difficulty either. But people who cannot support themselves.
Can you please define how an objective simple piece of data is somehow biased?
