This is what I also see. AI is used sparingly. Mostly for information lookup and autocomplete. It's just not good enough for other things. I could use it to write code if I really babysit it and triple check everything it does? Cool cool, maybe sometime later.
Who does typical code sweat shops churning out one smallish app at a time and quickly moving on? Certainly not your typical company-hired permanent dev, they (us) drown in tons of complex legacy code that keeps working for past 10-20 years and company sees no reason to throw it away.
Those folks that do churn out such apps, for them its great & horrible long term. For folks like me development is maybe 10% of my work, and by far the best part - creative, problem-solving, stimulating, actually learning myself. Why would I want to mildly optimize that 10% and loose all the good stuff, while speed wouldn't visibly even improve?
To really improve speed in bigger orgs, the change would have to happen in processes, office politics, management priorities and so on. No help of llms there, if anything trend-chasing managers just introduce more chaos with negative consequences.
Kafka isn't magic, but it's close. If a single-node solution like an SQL database can handle your load then why shouldn't you stick with SQL? Kafka is not for you. Kafka is for workloads that would DDoS Postgres.
I think block chains are inherently fine. The issue with bitcoin is that it isn't inflationary. Yes, yes, the supply increases over time, but that's also true for gold, and I've yet to hear anyone call gold inflationary. If a declining unit value is not guaranteed over time then it cannot be used as a currency and just becomes a savings vehicle / speculative asset. This is why all central banks aim for inflation. Try telling the true believers this and they'll reply with something about "sound money", seemingly nostalgic for the gold standard or something. It's rather disheartening.
Honestly I'd be a bit disappointed if something better came along tomorrow. Just as we as an industry spent all this effort moving to Rust something better comes along? Lame. Obviously I want better languages to come out, but I'd either want a bit of warning or a slower pace so we as an industry don't totally "waste" tons of time on transitioning between short-lived languages. Thankfully languages need about 10 years to mature from 0.1 to production readiness, and industry happily ignores marginally (and moderately) better languages than what they're using, so this is not a realistic issue.
If all Rust accomplishes is ushering some other better project, it would have been worth it.
I think it would take a while for that to happen, purely due to momentum' the same thing that makes some people think that Rust isn't being used will affect any younger language just as much, if not more.
I think that there's an easier language than Rust struggling to come out of it, but if Rust had been that easier language with different compromises, I doubt it would have gained critical mass that allowed it to get where it is today. Being fast and safe meant it carved a niche in a "free square" that drove it to have a clear differentiator that allowed it to gain an initial audience. I also suspect that it is easier toale a language fast and then evolve it to make it easier to use, than it is to make it easy to use first and then make it fast.
Note I ignored the 10x part. I'd find it a bit lame if a language came out that's 1.1x better than Rust because we're now in the awkward position of having rewritten lots of stuff in the second best language. However, should a 10x language come out you'll just have to swallow all that bitterness and start over because 10x is 10x.
Obviously a 1.1x language will come out - we don't just jump directly to 10x - and that's fine, fantastic even, but a little bit annoying when you're a language enthusiast and you've personally spent lots of time advocating for the now next-best language.
> Honestly I'd be a bit disappointed if something better came along tomorrow.
You'd be disappointed if something 10x better came along tomorrow? I suppose you would you also be disappointed if magically we had economical fusion power, because you own utility stocks? Or we invented 10x better new car, because you already own an old car?
Of course the world wouldn't immediately move to one thing or the other, etc., and we'd still have a 10x better thing?
> Obviously I want better languages to come out, but I'd either want a bit of warning or a slower pace
The purpose of this thought experiment is to say -- it's perfectly fine for things to live and die, if they must. We've had a second Cambrian period for PLs. It's perfectly alright if some don't live forever, including Rust, which I really like.
In my thought experiment, Rust and C could also accept this new paradigm, and adapt, and perhaps become 10x better themselves. Though this is something heretofore C/C++ haven't done very well. IMHO new things don't preclude old things, and there mustn't be only one winner.
> Thankfully languages need about 10 years to mature from 0.1 to production readiness, and industry happily ignores marginally (and moderately) better languages
Which my thought experiment did as well? Read: This is a 10x improvement!
Oops, skipped the 10x part. If it's really 10x better that would indeed be amazing. That's basically the leap from C to Rust in domains that C is not good at.
reply