Recently I posted 'Doing less'. Tl;dr: I wondered why we (as tech-society) seem to be thrilled about making inefficient round trips using AI for development, or chase each other to use typed languages, while we could be using more expressive programming languages instead. Instead of guessing human input, we could write untyped short scripts that detail every edge case carefully, but without extreme uncertainty of human language input nor the extreme preciseness of typed languages. Scripting, however, is scoffed at by Real Programmers, but then why oh why do we AI?
Someone suggested I should try a different programming language (knowing that I'm a rubyist). Try Crystal, a language that shares performance characteristics of other compiled languages like C and Rust (not always in the top regions, but close). And although I heard of it a long time ago, I kinda forgot about it, shi…
A lot of automation is about doing less manual labour. People who automate enjoy doing less. This desire lead to new programming languages, advanced IDE-tooling, but recently we've gotten a new type of assistance: AI. Microsoft using Github Copilot, Amazon with CodeWhisperer, and more will follow offering yet another Code predictor using 'open source' models.
But is it the right approach?
I mainly write in a language that was developed for developer happiness: ruby. It wasn't designed for optimal performance, but allows code to be readable and easy to write (when you have a certain proficiency in Ruby that is). After having turned CodePilot on and off for a year, I'm really not impressed. It has saved me typing strings that I might have otherwise copied from an earlier test, but with the disadvantage that the resulting text…
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